Letters: Volume 112

The first translated collection of Hortense Mancini's correspondence.

During the seventeenth century, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646-99), became an icon of women's emancipation. In 1668, she shocked Europe when she fled her coercive husband and began a nomadic exile. Her notoriety increased in 1675 with the publication of her memoir-one of the first to appear in French by a woman-and was later magnified by her stint as the royal mistress of Charles II of England and by her establishment of a freethinking salon in London. As a salonniere, an exile, and a litigant fighting for legal separation from her husband, Mancini's letters were a means of connection, collusion, and survival as well as cultural collaboration. Collected and translated here for the first time, this correspondence charts her struggle for autonomy in her own words.