At the same time that secular and religious authorities suppressed women's efforts to read, conduct books written specifically for girls and young unmarried women emerged as a new genre. Nadine Berenguier offers an in-depth analysis of this development in eighteenth-century France, situating conduct books in the context of Enlightenment concerns about improving education in order to reform society. Her study contributes to our understanding of how print culture in eighteenth-century France gave shape to a specific social subset of new readers: modern girls.

Nadine Berenguier has a Ph. D. from Stanford University and is Associate Professor of French at the University of New Hampshire, USA. She is the author of L'Infortune des alliances: contrat, mariage et fiction au dix-huitième siècle.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Textual Strategies: Between oral and print cultures; Authorial anxieties. Part II Topoi: Perceptions of motherhood; Maneuvering new social spaces; Marriage and its disillusions. Part III Reception: The cultural landscape of the18th-century press; Anne-Thérèse de Lambert's Avis d'une mère à sa fille; Madeleine de Puisieux's Conseils à une amie; Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont's Magasin des adolescentes and Instructions pour les jeunes dames; Louise d'Epinay's Conversations d'Emilie; Graillard, Cerfvol and Reyre; Conduct books in early literary history; Editorial fortunes in the 19th century; Bibliography; Index.