The Princess of Clèves: A New Translation

The court of Henri II, 1558. It is the most brilliant and most dangerous place in France - a world of faction and surveillance, where every glance is noted and every feeling is potential scandal.Into this world comes a young woman of remarkable beauty and equally remarkable moral seriousness, brought by her mother to find a suitable match. She marries the Prince of Clèves - a man she respects and cannot love with equal force. And then she meets the Duc de Nemours, the most admired man at court, and finds herself facing something her mother warned her about and her entire upbringing has prepared her to resist.What follows is not a story of seduction or betrayal, but something far more unsettling: the account of a woman who sees her own feelings with absolute clarity, names them honestly, and still cannot resolve the conflict between passion and principle that threatens to consume everything she has tried to be.Published anonymously in 1678, The Princess of Clèves sparked immediate controversy - not only about who had written it, but about whether its heroine had made the right choice. Readers argued in salons across France. They have not stopped arguing since.Widely regarded as the first psychological novel in the French language, and one of the founding works of modern fiction. By Madame de La Fayette.

Pagina's: 194, Paperback, Independently published