"Sophie Cottin was a barren woman. Her correspondence reveals that she suffered from persistent amenorrhea - the absence of menstruation - throughout almost all of her mature life. Married in 1789 at the age of nineteen, she found herself widowed and childless four years later.

As a result of many factors, among them the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, late eighteenth-century France had become a fiercely pronatalistic culture; women were valorized essentially through their fertility, that is, through maternal production. Having openly espoused Rousseau's ideas on the proper social roles for women, Cottin understood well that there was little use for barren women like herself in post-revolutionary French culture. Caught between the ideological positions she had embraced and the reality of her sterility, she cast about for alternatives. In the early years of her widowhood, she took up writing in a serious way, admitting that she found writing therapeutic.

Her story, little known to modern readers on either side of the Atlantic, may nevertheless be a perfect case study of a woman's "coming to writing" in post-revolutionary France. This book explores the crucial connections between her self-perceived "defectiveness" and her literary production."--BOOK JACKET.