Madeleine de Scudery (1607-1701) was the most popular novelist in her time, read in French in volume installments all over Europe and translated into English, German, Italian, and even Arabic. But she was also a charismatic figure in French salon culture, a woman who supported herself through her writing and defended women's education. She was the first woman to be honored by the French Academy, and she earned a pension from Louis XIV for her writing. Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues is a careful selection of Scudery's shorter writings, emphasizing her abilities as a rhetorical theorist, orator, essayist, and letter writer. It provides the first English translations of some of Scudery's Amorous Letters, only recently identified as her work, as well as selections from her Famous Women, or Heroic Speeches, and her series of Conversations. The book will be of great interest to scholars of the history of rhetoric, French literature, and women's studies.

Jane Donawerth is professor of English and affiliate faculty in women's studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language and, most recently, editor of Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology. Julie Strongson, a specialist in French and English comparative literature, is an instructor at the University of Maryland.