A widowed marquise of the French nobility, she was devoted to her children. When her daughter married and moved away, she became despondent. Loneliness prompted her to begin writing letters to Françoise Marguerite, a correspondence that by her death had numbered an estimated 1,700 epistles. It is the “most intimate and sustained chronicle of a mother-daughter relationship ever recorded” (New Oxford Companion to Literature in French).“After her daughter had gone to Provence, Sevigne was indeed inconsolable. Her devotion to the absent Francoise was intense; she and her friends wondered if it was too intense. In February 1671, four days after...
