Vicki Mistacco

I began my academic career as a specialist of the 20^th-century novel, with a dissertation and early publications on ambiguity in Gide and Mauriac. I later became interested in reader theory, focusing on challenges to reading in the New Novel and Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular. I have since turned my attention almost exclusively to feminist literary theory, women’s writing, and women’s literary history. In this vein, I have published feminist readings of fiction by Albert Camus, studies of Marguerite Duras, Chantal Chawaf, George Sand, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Félicité de Genlis, Louise de Keralio and Louise d’Alq, among others, as well as the entry on la femme auteur in the Dictonnaire des femmes des Lumières. My major contribution to the field is a two-volume anthology of women’s writing in French from the Middle Ages to the present: Les femmes et la tradition littéraire: Anthologie du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Yale, 2006-2007). A new project was inspired by this work: “The Impulse to Anthologize” which studies anthologies, biographical dictionaries, and other compendia of women’s writing published by women between 1750 and 1970. Louise de Keralio’s Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français composés par des femmes (1786-1789) was to be the pièce de résistance of this new study. But Keralio proved to be too fascinating and important an intellectual for my work on her to be limited by this context. Thus, I wrote an article on her achievements in the 1780s, which were unusual for a woman of that time. In addition to her 12-volume Collection, she produced a 5-volume serious history, Histoire d’Élisabeth, she secretly ran a publishing business, she became in 1789 the first woman in France to found a political newspaper, and she was the first to be elected to the royal Académie d’Arras. It soon became clear that she deserved an entire book. A ten-year detour to study every aspect of her corpus of over forty volumes, including novels, political pamphlets, political journalism, erudite history, extensively annotated translations from English and Italian to French led to my latest book, Louise de Keralio, Enlightenment Intellectual (Oxford, 2026), the first full-length study of this ambitious philosophe of the Enlightenment.

Prior to my retirement in 2013, I enjoyed helping students in language courses learn to express themselves with precision and elegance. I also enjoyed teaching a variety of 300-level courses on the novel and on women’s writing: Male and Female Perspectives in the 18th-Century Novel; Narrative in the 20^th Century which examined challenges to the “great narratives” of the past by 20^th-century writers ranging from André Gide to Assia Djebar; Women, Language, and  Literary Expression, on the critical notion of difference in fiction by 20^th-century women writers in France; and a seminar on the poetics of the Other and the practice of écriture feminine in the works of Marguerite Duras. My 200-level course, Mothers and Daughters, traced the evolving representation and cultural significance of this complex relationship in literature and art from the late seventeenth century to the present. Women and Literary Tradition, an introduction to French literature focusing on women writers, was the impetus behind the publication of Les Femmes et la tradition littéraire, which evolved from materials originally created for this course.

I was a long-standing member of the Sweet Briar Junior Year in France National Advisory Board and have served on the advisory board of Modern Language Studies and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities. I currently serve on the H-France Book Review Advisory Panel. In keeping with my work on women’s writing, I have been presenting my research at almost every conference organized by Women in French and have participated similarly in colloquia held in France, Belgium, and England on women writers and women’s literary history.

I enjoy travel, photography, art, gardening, and cooking. Studying Louise de Keralio, I discovered my passion for archival research. I revel in the beauty of France and the French language.