La Princesse De Clèves Par Mme De La Fayette: Edited with Introduction and Notes
La Princesse De Clèves Par Mme De La Fayette: Edited with Introduction and Notes
In 1678, a woman writing under a man's name changed literature forever. The Princesse de Clèves is the first novel to map the geography of the human heart with surgical precision: its contradictions, its silences, its unbearable secrets. Set amid the glittering cruelty of Henry II's court, it tells the story of a young woman of extraordinary beauty and virtue who is married to a man she respects but cannot love. Then she meets the Duc de Nemours, and everything unravels. What makes this book astonishing is not its plot (though it remains addictive) but what Madame de La Fayette discovered: that the most dramatic battles take place inside a person's mind. When Madame de Clèves makes her legendary decision to confess her forbidden feelings to her husband rather than act on them, she invents a kind of emotional honesty that literature is still catching up to. This edition also includes The Princesse de Montpensier and The Comtesse de Tende, two darker studies in desire and destruction.
