MADAME DE SEVIGNE: A LIFE AND LETTERS by Frances Mossiker Knopf; 538 pages; $22.95
Virginia Woolf celebrated Mme. de Sévigné in a lyrical essay: "This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists ..." Thornton Wilder sketched an invidious portrait of the 17th century French author in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; the poet Alphonse Lamartine called her the Petrarch of French prose; Proust compared her art to Dostoyevsky's.
These testimonials notwithstanding, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), remains...