The Story of Ernestine

Marie Riccoboni (1713-92) was an actress and a writer who published more than twenty works. Appearing in 1765, The Story of Ernestine was a critical and popular success. Riccoboni was among the first women to support themselves through their writing. Joan Hinde Stewart is president of Hamilton College. Her scholarship focuses on 18th-century French literature, especially women writers. Her latest book, The Enlightenment of Age, a study of women and aging in early modern France, was published by the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, England, in fall 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yale University, the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a fellow at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, France, a visiting scholar at Oxford University in England, and a fellow at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Letters in Bogliasco, Italy. Philip Stewart's study of French narrative has led to the publication of Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir-Novel, 1700-1750; Le Masque et la parole: le langage de l'amour au XVIIIe siecle; an edition of Prevost's Cleveland; and a study of literary illustrations entitled Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century. Professor Stewart is a former president of the American Association of Teachers of French and a member of the Editorial Board of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.

"Once again the MLA's Texts and Translations series has provided the public with an affordable copy of a hard to find text in both contemporary French and English. These versions of this short novel are accessible to today's reader while they still retain the feel of the original text as the translators have made a concerted effort to structure their language to reflect the time when the book was originally written." --Tamara A. Cox, Gardner-Webb University