Cartas a la hija

The letters that Madame de Sévigné wrote to the Countess of Grignan, her daughter, have gone down in history as an absolute pinnacle of epistolary literature, even more so of love literature. In effect, the Marquise de Sévigné, widow of a hustler, pours into her daughter, newly married, a complex and yearning filial love, until discovering -alarmed, even though Sévigné is not a pious- that he loves her more than God. An outstanding figure in the brilliant court of Louis XIV, that Grand Siècle in which the most ingenious spirits coincided, this salonnière, a close friend of Madame de La Fayette and François de La Rochefoucauld, shines for her intelligence, her irony, her taunts and the freshness and grace of his style, for his spontaneous and zigzagging prose like a conversation. The fashions, the pregnancies that make women sick, the dispute between the ancients and the moderns, the gossip of the court or the transience of life, this unstoppable woman encompasses everything in the public life of her time who possesses the analytical virtues of a psychologist, the passion of a novelist and the sagacity of a philosopher. Of the more than a thousand letters that are preserved from Madame de Sévigné, the writer Laura Freixas has selected and translated those where her radical modernity and the vividness of her style shine, admired by, among others, Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust.