Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
La Femme Savante
By Gabriele Annan
Rameau's Niece
by Cathleen Schine
Ticknor and Fields, 280 pp., $19.95
Rameau's Niece is a jeu d'esprit for readers who would be able to guess that from the title, and who would feel at home in the milieu it inhabits. The milieu is defined by its 'initial dinnerparty question…either 'What is your field?' or 'What are you working on?' depending on the degree of familiarity between participants in the exchange.' The heroine, Margaret Nathan, is twenty-eight and has published a biography of an eighteenth-century French femme savante, an anatomist called Madame de Montigny. Unexpectedly the book made it to the top of the best-seller list because the critics praised it for being readable as well as scholarly. It also won Margaret a grant and an office at Princeton, which she doesn't use because she is thoroughly dug into her life in New York.
Review, 1253 words
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