Navy cloth binding with gilt title on the spine and front board. Spine faded

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For conditions, please view the photographs. Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs. These displayed her as a writer of rare intensity. The literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve ranks her letters with those by Héloïse and with the Letters of a Portuguese Nun (the latter now believed to be epistolary fiction rather than real letters). Other writers, focusing on her theme of passionate love rather than on genre, place her work alongside that of novelists such as Abbé Prévost and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mlle de Lespinasse’s letters center on her great and thwarted love for two men: Don José María Pignatelli y Gonzaga, Marquis de Mora, who was the son of Joaquín Pignatelli, Spanish ambassador in Paris, and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, a French general and writer. Less dispassionately philosophical than those by such later eighteenth century letter writers as Madame de Stael, they offer a portrait of someone who saw herself as a tragic heroine sacrificing all for love.