"Bizarre et contredisante", Etre femme selon Isabelle de Charrière

This paper presents Isabelle de Charrière in the light of her aspiration, both personal and political, for greater freedom and equality. Her fiction is presented in the context of the French Revolution, while her writing also needs to be understood in relation to gender. As a person, she was forced to negotiate a special life for herself. David-Louis Constant d'Hermenches and Benjamin Constant were of great assistance in making her feel legitimate in her singularity, and so was her husband Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière. As a writer, she regarded inequality between the sexes as an issue which needed to be exposed in cultural and political terms. Throughout her tales and novels, she self-consistently addressed gender and rank together as similarly dependent on an arbitrary power. While hoping that the two kinds of power - aristocratic and patriarchal - might be reformed together, she dramatised the fact, after 1792, that the latter would remain largely unquestioned or, even, be reinforced.