内容简介：
This volume covers the lives and works of 30 pre-revolutionary French women, providing a representative sampling of their manifold and varied contributions to intellectual and cultural history. The authors included here range from those prominent because of their social position or literary fame to those slowly becoming part of a new canon of Old Regime women writers whose works were known to their contemporaries but who have slipped into near invisibility in the following centuries until their recent rediscovery and reassessment.