啟蒙書籍的女性閱讀史――以18世紀中葉兩位巴黎女子的通信文獻為例

Friends Who Read Together: A Case Study of Women’s Readings of Enlightenment Literature through the Correspondences of Two Young Parisian Ladies in the mid-18th Century

This article examines how two young women readers in mid-eighteenth-century Paris were able to access Enlightenment books and how they engaged with them. One was Geneviève-Françoise Randon de Malboissier, daughter of a financial official, and the other was Marie-Jeanne Philippon, daughter of an engraver, later known during the French Revolution as Madame Roland. Both carried on long correspondences with intimate female friends during their early years, in which they wrote extensively about the books they read. This article presents the reading histories of these two self-taught women in the context of their correspondences and Paris’s book-publishing history. As young women and ordinary readers, they were doubly marginalized, on the periphery of both the world of intellectual production and the intended cultured audience in relation to Enlightenment authors and literary circles. The article also argues that their reading experiences highlight the social and inclusive aspects of the Enlightenment movement centered in Paris, a city of books in the mid-eighteenth century.