Contrary to what Wood postulates, one certainly does not have to wait until the Eneydes, Crenne’s fourth and final published work, to appreciate Crenne (the pen name of Marguerite Briet) as a most learned Renaissance humanist writer. (Wood argues that this work “provides the most developed expression of [Crenne’s] humanism” [135]). Crenne’s erudition in the Epistres, her second published work, displays a writer extremely indebted to classical, biblical, and Medieval/Renaissance texts and authors. Her one-page praise of illustrious and learned women of the past, found in the Fourth Invective Letter, is intertextually linked to more than a dozen earlier writings (to the “diversitez de livres” that Hélisenne criticizes her fictional misogynist husband for not being familiar with). This very learned profeminist passage reveals Crenne already to be a Renaissance humanist virago author and scholar. There must be other reasons that explain why Crenne produced her translation of Virgil at the end of her literary career. These reasons probably had little to do with her having the time, finally, to develop and display a vast humanist erudition, since she already possessed it at the beginning of her career. By publishing her very popular romance novel and her letters, Crenne was simply better able to gain and keep the very large readership that developed around her works.

This reviewer is thus not convinced by Wood’s main critical notion: her argument that we must see a development or progression of the fictional authorial persona Hélisenne de Crenne. To be sure, there is an intensification of the virago voice in Crenne’s writings, but it is not accurate to imply, or rather to state categorically as Wood does, that “from a timid beginning [in the Epistres familieres], she gradually found a voice and used it [in the Epistres invectives] in her own defense and in defense of her sex” (96). To interpret the personal letters as somehow unrelated or disconnected to the invective ones misses the mark. There is nothing “timid” about the fully developed virago voice that exposes and ridicules the evil, hurtful ways of woman’s misogynist adversaries in the Epistres familieres. One only has to reread what Crenne has to say against “les sceleres & meschans detracteurs” who had verbally abused or slandered her female cousin, or especially what she writes about “ce decptif & frauduleux sexe viril,” or about “les faulx & desloyaulx pleins de libidinosité […] à qui deception est familiere” who had sexually abused women. Crenne previews polemical themes in her personal letters in regard to others, themes that she will expand on in her invective ones in regard to herself.

In spite of the caveats expressed above, Wood’s study is, as already indicated a good introduction to Crenne’s writings. Her discussion of Crenne’s Songe, a highly neglected allegorical dream, is especially welcome. She correctly sides with Robert Cottrell’s 1997 article with classifies much of Crenne’s thinking along the lines of Erasmian evangelism. In the conclusion to her book, Wood states: “Hélisenne de Crenne was at the forefront of the creation of both the sentimental and the epistolary novel. She was a pioneer feminist. She was a serious scholar in the humanist tradition” (153). This overall view of Hélisenne de Crenne could not be better stated.

–Jerry C. Nash, French Review, 76.4

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