“[…] Among the period’s female writers was Isabelle de Charrière, one of the century’s subtlest and most compelling novelists, who has been excluded from the French canon by reason of both her sex and her nationality. […] Her marriage at the age of thirty to Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, an obscure Swiss citizen, took her from Holland to Switzerland […]. There she produced in French a voluminous oeuvre that includes novels, essays, verse, plays, and music. Her correspondence reveals her as provocative and sometimes grim, and her novels resemble her personality. […]”