Marie le Jars de Gournay

French writer and translator

• Born: October 6, 1565
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: July 13, 1645
• Place of death: Paris, France

Known mainly as the posthumous editor of the Essais of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Gournay also was a writer, translator, and feminist. Her aesthetic theories contributed to the contemporary debate on the development and expansion of the French language and literature. Conversations at her salon helped influence the creation of the Académie Française.

Early Life

Marie le Jars de Gournay (mah-ree leh-zhahr deh guhr-neh) was the eldest daughter of Guillaume le Jars and Jeanne d’Hacqueville. When the family fortunes were affected by the French Wars of Religion, they relinquished their ownership of the town of Le Jars and left their estates to move to Paris, where, in 1561, Marie’s father was appointed a court official. After his death in 1577, financial difficulties compelled Marie’s mother to move with Marie and her five younger siblings to their country castle of Gournay-sur-Aronde, Picardy. It was here that Marie began her study of Latin, which led to her work as a literary translator.

She pursued her education against her mother’s wishes, studying the classics, not with a tutor, but by comparing the originals with French translations. She never received the formal education she so craved because of her mother’s conservative opposition; in consequence, perhaps, she spent a lifetime advocating educational opportunities for women.

Life’s Work

At age eighteen, Gournay opened the book that would change her life: Montaigne’s Essais. Although her initial excitement was so great that her family thought she needed sedation, her interest evolved into a lifelong devotion to the work and to memory of its author. In 1588, she met Montaigne in Paris and began her correspondence with him. He called her his fille d’alliance, his “adopted [literary] daughter,” and he welcomed her incisive insights into his work. After Montaigne’s visits to the Gournay estate, Gournay wrote Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne (1594; The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne, 2002; better known as The Promenade ), a novel based on a story she supposedly told him during their walks.

Gournay’s mother died in 1591, leaving Gournay responsible for her younger siblings in straitened circumstances, which were to continue throughout her life. Montaigne died in 1592, but it was many months before Gournay was notified of his death by the great Flemish Humanist, Justus Lipsius, a mutual friend, who appreciated Gournay’s work. In 1594, Montaigne’s widow sent the manuscripts of the Essais to Gournay, asking her to serve as his posthumous editor. Gournay brought out an edition within nine months, prefaced by her defense of his writing; the 1598 revised edition was based upon work at the Montaigne home in Bordeaux, which she visited in 1595. She continued her editorial work on the Essais over the course of her lifetime.

Gournay published The Promenade, a psychological romance-tragedy, in 1594. The work argued against forced marriages and for a woman’s right to choose a spouse and to pursue an education. Her digressions treat themes she would develop over her lifetime: gender equity, love affairs, and the condition of women in society, as well as the nature of wisdom, political integrity, and responsibility. All of her arguments were accompanied with quotations from Latin, Greek, and French writers. This first of what would be many editions of The Promenade also included specimens of her poetry and her translation extracts from Vergil’s Aeneid.

After staying with the Montaigne family for about a year and a half, Gournay had to attend to her family’s disorganized finances. Although she was well-connected with influential circles and although she received funds throughout her life from friends, family, and the royal court, financial matters remained a source of worry.

In 1597, she traveled to the Netherlands, perhaps to meet Lipsius, perhaps to promote Montaigne’s work, or perhaps to advance her own literary reputation. She was well received by people of eminence in Brussels and Antwerp, and it was at this point that she may have decided to devote her life to literary pursuits.

Gournay was a staunch defender of the older poetic theories and practice of Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) and the literary circle La Pléiade. She debated with the representative of new poetics, François de Malherbe (1555-1628), probably in the circle of Marguerite of Valois, the repudiated wife of King Henry IV of France, and in other centers of conversation that preceded the salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, hosted by the marquise de Rambouillet. She won the favor of the duke of Névers, who presented her to Henry IV, from whom she hoped to gain a pension, a hope that was dashed by the assassination of the king in 1610. Gournay’s “Adieu de l’am du Roy de France et de Navarre, Henry le Grand à la Royne, avec la Defence des pères Jesuites” (farewell to the soul of Henry the Great, king of France and Navarre, to the queen, with the defense of the Jesuit fathers) led to vitriolic attacks against her by those hostile to the Jesuits.

In a 1619 publication, Versions de quelques pièces de Virgile, Tacite et Saluste, avec l’Institution de Monseigneur, frère unique du Roy (some fragments translated from Virgil, Tacitus, and Sallust, with the institution of Monseigneur, the only brother of the king), she laid out literary positions that she would treat in detail seven years later and would spend most of her life defending. In print, she criticized Malherbe and the new poetic theory, extolling Ronsard and La Pléiade, thus establishing herself both as dated in her ideas and as an advocate of La Pléiade notions of the inspired nature of poetic creation.

Her 1622 essay, “Egalité des Hommes et des femmes” (“The Equality of Men and Women,” 2002) argues that without social repression, women would be the moral and intellectual equals of men. She published another feminist essay, “Grief des dames” (“The Ladies’ Complaint,” 2002) in 1626, and would continue advocating against the oppressive social condition of women.

In 1626, Gournay published a large collection of works called “L’Ombre de la demoiselle de Gournay”(the shadow of Miss de Gournay), which contained detailed studies of poetics; the “Apologie pour celle qui escrit” (Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works , 2002); moral and autobiographical essays; original poetry; a defense of a new edition of The Promenade; translations of classical authors, including Tacitus, Sallust, Ovid, Cicero, and Vergil; and an essay on the art of translation, asserting that modern translators of classics must use language that can transfer nuances of feeling and subject matter to the translation. In her several essays on language and literature, she discusses further her aesthetic theories, claiming, among other things, that for Malherbe and the new poets, poetry ceased to be an inspired, sacred art, and instead became a craft, which inhibited the flourishing of French literature.

Her third-floor Parisian apartment on the rue de l’Arbre sec, where she lived until around 1628, became Gournay’s salon, where she received many distinguished visitors. She moved to the rue St. Honoré with her lifelong attendant and friend, Nicole Jamyn. Her residence became one of several centers of discussion that led to the founding of the Académie Française. From this address she assembled her last collection, Les Advis: Ou, Le Présens de la demoiselle de Gournay (the opinions and writings of Miss de Gournay), published in 1634 and revised 1641, and a last edition of the Montaigne’s Essais, dedicated to and made possible by Cardinal de Richelieu.

Significance

Gournay was both admired and satirized in her own time for her aesthetic vision, her lifestyle, and her association with the Académie Française. The Promenade is considered a forerunner of French psychological and feminist novels, featuring a female protagonist who defies convention to strive for self-fulfillment. Her essays on women’s equality were very much ahead of their time, with arguments taken up and expanded upon by later generations. Her life as an independent woman of letters, which she surely had to defend, helped pave the way for other women. Her translation theory, evidenced in her own poetic translations, was that translation is an art that should produce a work of beauty as aesthetically satisfying as the original. In a time when new poetic theory discarded much figurative language, Gournay’s insistence on the necessity of extreme metaphor and other figures anticipated later practice. Within a generation, several aspects of Gournay’s literary agenda became standard practice in many circles, prefiguring the Baroque age .

Bibliography

Bauschatz, Cathleen M. “Marie de Gournay’s Gendered Images for Language and Poetry.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25, no. 3 (Fall, 1995): 489-500. Assesses Gournay’s feminizing of language and images as an act of literary feminism. This edition of the journal is a special issue on Gournay and Montaigne.

Bijvoet, Maya. “Marie de Gournay, Editor of Montaigne.” In Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Translation of Gournay’s two feminist essays, with evaluations of each. Includes a biography.

Dezon-Jones, Elyane. “Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645).” In French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, edited by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Contains a survey of criticism from Gournay’s lifetime to the present.

Gournay, Marie le Jars de. Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works. Edited and translated by Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Contains the first English translations of Gournay’s The Promenade and The Apology for the Woman Writing, along with translations of other texts. Includes introductory material for each essay and a bibliography.

Holmes, Peggy. “Marie de Gournay’s Defense of Baroque Imagery.” French Studies 8 (April, 1954): 122-131. Analysis of Gournay’s theories concerning poetic practice.

Ilsely, Marjorie H. A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Works. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1963. Still the most authoritative biography in English.