Claudine Alexandrine Guerin de Tencin, the History of the Count de Comminge, Translated by Charlotte Lennox (Electronic book text)

In 1756 Charlotte Lennox, already a celebrated novelista she had just published her most renowned work, The Female Quixote, a year beforea translated from the original French one of the most successful novels written by Madame Claudine Gerin, the marquise de Tencin, Memoires du comte de Comminge (1735). At the time, Madame de Tencin was a controversial public figure, an intellectual woman and one of the most distinguished salonnieres in eighteenth-century France. Although Tencina s name as the authoress of the novel was kept secret until after her death, notwithstanding the outstanding success of her Memoires, Charlotte Lennox knew that the novel had been penned by a woman and decided to translate it and later serialize it in her feminist magazine The Ladya s Museum, a periodical wholly devoted to womena s literary and cultural education. Lennoxa s translation of Tencina s short novel is here reprinted for the first time after two centuries with critical notes and an introduction, in an edition that takes into account a close comparison between Lennoxa s translation and Madame de Tencina s original French version, and analyses all the variations and addenda that appeared in Lennoxa s own version of The History of the Count de Comminge.

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