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 salonnière, 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.
 

"A historical figure who has long fascinated audiences, Hortense Mancini has been subject to caricature and sensationalist coverage by her contemporaries and also by subsequent historians and biographers. Nicholson’s serious account of her life and works will help counter these trends and provide reliable material for further study. Assiduously collating this fairly small but fascinating body of writing, scattered as it is across different countries and continents in libraries, private collections, archives, auction catalogs, and in books where the letters were attributed to other authors, Nicholson shows how Mancini's writing can provide a fruitful example of the voice of a woman who moved in intellectual circles but who historians are reluctant to term “intellectual.”" - Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Professor Emerita of French literature, Department of Romance Studies, Boston University