In 1984 I was a graduate student in Paris working on my dissertation, which would be published six years later as Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (Rutgers UP, 1990). When I would describe my work on early modern women writers to the students and faculty members of France’s École Normale Supérieure, the training ground that consecrated French professors and scholars, their reaction was one of incredulity: “They let you do that?” was their skeptical and derisive query, followed by “What women writers?” To believe that women had played a role in France’s literary culture and were anything but “précieuses ridicules” was considered heresy.

My dissertation topic didn’t garner much more respect at home, but, remarkably, given the newness of the field, I felt supported by PMLA. During those early years that witnessed the dawn of women’s studies as a discipline, PMLA published two groundbreaking pieces that shaped an entire field of inquiry and a new approach to literary and cultural history: Nancy K. Miller’s “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction” and Joan DeJean’s “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity”. These bold, inspiring, and seminal works provided a foundation for women’s studies and changed our conception of literary culture. Forty years later, scholars continue to build on their insights. PMLA’s bold and prescient move in the early 1980s to lend its considerable imprimatur to the study of early modern French women writers forced a reevaluation of an entire literary field that included France’s illustrious canonical authors. These scholarly works inspired many of us to reinterpret literary culture as a whole, and to resurrect the voices and actions of figures who had long since been relegated to the shadows, women as well as men. 

Miller’s and DeJean’s articles were examples of impeccable, innovative, and inspired scholarship, carefully crafted and beautifully written, and designed to stand the test of time rather than illustrate a passing trend. Both made readers think in new ways, compelling them to build on their foundational ideas. Miller applied her reinterpretation of Gérard Genette’s essay “Vraisemblance et motivation” to the novels of women, advancing the idea that women writers were often consciously using fiction to script a plot that was at odds with their society’s concept of plausible female behavior. This insight gave new gravitas to the novel genre and refashioned the concept of the woman writer. DeJean changed the way we thought about anonymity, suggesting that some women didn’t sign their works not because they didn’t dare, or because they couldn’t, but because they chose to use anonymity as a powerful tool. DeJean reinterpreted the word aveu, which she argued could be understood in the seventeenth century to mean “declaration” rather than “confession,” thus completely changing our view of the heroine of Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, France’s first modern novel. When interpreted in her historical and linguistic context, DeJean argued, the princess scripts her own narrative, one at odds with those of her contemporaries, thus illustrating Miller’s point that women used fiction to advance alternative notions of verisimilitude and to contest society’s “plots and plausibilities” for women. By taking women’s authorship seriously and interpreting their works in the contexts that produced them, Miller and DeJean contend that literary history itself has been constructed not to reflect historical reality but to relegate women’s participation in literary culture to the margins of history.

The insights offered by DeJean and Miller may today seem self-evident and mainstream. At the time, however, these pieces provoked considerable backlash (e.g., Odile Hullot-Kentor, “Clèves Goes to Business School: A Review of DeJean and Miller,” Stanford French Review, vols. 13–14, 1989–90, pp. 251–66). The creation of a new scholarly field necessarily entails risk. I will always be grateful to the team that produces PMLA for accepting such risk and for publishing outstanding scholarship that builds on the insights of the past to push the boundaries of scholarly culture. Authors may complain about “death by refereeing,” but it is precisely the review process that establishes PMLA’s authority to advance fields such as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies effectively.

Links to the PMLA archive:

DeJean, Joan. “Lafayette’s Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity.” PMLA, vol. 99, no. 5, Oct. 1984, pp. 884–902. Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 96, no. 1, Jan. 1981, pp. 36–48.

Faith E. Beasley is professor of French at Dartmouth College. She is a specialist of early modern French culture, focusing on the construction of history and memory, especially as it pertains to marginalized groups. Her publications include Revising Memory: Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (Rutgers UP, 1990), Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Ashgate, 2006), and Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal (Toronto UP, 2018). She has edited two MLA volumes—Approaches to Teaching La Princesse de Clèves (with Katharine Ann Jensen) and Options for Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers—and served on the PMLA Editorial Board from 2018 to 2020.