As a novelist, Isabelle de Charrière is in many respects the Jane Austen of French literature, a subtle ironist on the everyday life of men and women during the 1760-1805 period. Although Charrière's novels have only recently become available in paperback editions, readers have long admired the wit and modernity of her writing. Kathleen Jaeger offers us the first book-length study of an important novelist who is only now coming into her own. Jaeger has fresh ideas about Charrière's best-known novels, but she has also made some fascinating discoveries about the lesser-known works, which alter our notions of how gender is represented in the eighteenth-century novel. (Janet Gurkin Altman, The University of Iowa) ukryj opis