Marie de Gournay

Philosopher, translator, fiction writer, and editor: it is virtually impossible to pin down one authorial or scholarly identity for Marie de Gournay (b. 1565–d. 1645). Over the course of an extraordinary career that spanned over forty years, the autodidact Gournay created an extensive body of work, remarkable both for its range of genre and subject and for the painstaking care with which she returned repeatedly to her texts, reworking them and recasting them in different editorial contexts for different publics. Gournay is increasingly studied and valued by scholars for the writings of her late career, particularly for her work on gender and equality, on moral philosophy, on language and poetry, and for her monumental editions of her collected works. But for most of the 350 years since her death, she was known principally as the editor of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. Gournay did much to foreground her identity as Montaigne’s fille d’alliance (or “covenant daughter”), which is a term meant to capture a friendship between the two writers —the older, male essayist, and the younger female one—that appears to have been as historically founded as it was textually cultivated. Until the late 20th century, popular and scholarly opinion has generally been unkind to Gournay. Although during her career she had her supporters and correspondents (Montaigne himself, it appears, and, notably, scholars such as Justus Lipsius and Anna Maria Von Schurman), during her lifetime Gournay was also mocked as a bluestocking, made the butt of various pranks, and ridiculed in print. Scholarly disdain for Gournay continued into the 19th and early 20th centuries. With the rediscovery of the “Bordeaux Copy” of Montaigne’s Essais in the early 19th century—with additions and comments in Montaigne’s hand that differed from those that appeared in Gournay’s 1595 edition—Gournay’s reputation as a “faithful” editor was called into question. Critics also cast doubt on the mutuality of the friendship with Montaigne and suggested that Gournay was little better than an obsessive fan. This disdainful attitude toward Gournay has altered radically in the last thirty years. Gournay’s essays and treatises, in addition to her work on the Essais, have become the subject of several volumes of essays and monographs as scholars have increasingly made Gournay-as-author the subject of critical inquiry; in addition, scholars have sought greater purchase on the mutually informative relation between her editorial work and her writing. Gournay’s complete works have also been reproduced carefully in excellent critical editions. Strikingly, the debate over her work on Montaigne’s Essais has also come full circle, as the 1595 text has been re-adopted as the definitive version of the Essais for the recent Pléiade edition. The quickened scholarly interest in Gournay over the past twenty years—much of which defends her as editor and author—no doubt played a role in that editorial decision.

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