Mihoko Suzuki

Women’s Literary History in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France: Louise de Kéralio and Henriette Guizot de Witt

This chapter will examine women’s literary histories produced by Louise de Keralio (1756–1822), the first female editor of a French newspaper, Journal de l’homme et du citoyen, established in 1789, and Henriette Guizot de Witt (1829–1908)––the daughter of the prominent politician and historian Francois Guizot––who published over one hundred volumes on history and other subjects. On the eve of the French Revolution, Keralio published some of the planned volumes of Collection des meilleurs ouvrages francois: composes par des femmes, dediee aux femmes francoises [Collection of the Best French Works Composed by Women, Dedicated to Frenchwomen] (1786–88), a multi-volume history of women’s literature in France. A century later, Guizot de Witt wrote Les Femmes dans l’histoire [The Women in History] (1888), which included women writers—both French and English––active during the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars. While Keralio’s history was inflected by the historical context of the French Revolution, Guizot de Witt’’s was inflected by her experience of the Revolution of 1848 during which she, along with her father, was exiled in England. Both writers’ careers were enabled by the precedent of their fathers and mothers who were also writers, though the fathers had a much greater impact––both positive and negative.