Présentation de l'éditeur Both Claire and her husband, M. d'Albe, are virtuous and upstanding, and Frédéric, her husband's nineteen-year-old adopted son and factory assistant, is honest and noble-hearted. But in the beautiful and secluded Loire Valley, the friendship between Claire and Frédéric gradually develops into a forbidden passion. Claire d'Albe (1799) was audacious in its day for its representation of adulterous love as a positive act of self-fulfillment. As the volume editor, Margaret Cohen, indicates, Sophie Cottin's best-selling work of sentimentalism highlights the tension in Enlightenment liberalism between collective welfare and personal happiness. Although such later French authors as Stendhal and Balzac denigrated sentimentalism along with female novelists, Claire d'Albe influenced their realist aesthetics. Biographie de l'auteur Sophie Cottin, born in 1770, was raised in a Protestant, upper-middle-class family from Bordeaux. She received no formal education but corresponded and read extensively. Exiled from Paris by the Terror and displaced by the loss of her husband, mother, and fortune, she retired to a country house in 1794 to become one of France's preeminent novelists. Claire d'Albe was translated into several languages. Margaret Cohen is professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Her publications include The Novel and the Sea, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, and The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
