Recht doen aan schrijfsterschap: Belle van Zuylen en haar correspondentie

Isabelle de Charrière/Belle de Zuylen was born in the Netherlands, where she lived until her marriage at age 30. We know her therefore best as Belle van Zuylen (in spite of nearly all her work having been written and published in French, when she was living in Switzerland and known as Isabelle de Charrière). She tends to be represented in the Low Countries as an ever-young woman, the focus often being on her need of finding an appropriate marriage candidate. It was her particular attitude towards some of these marriage candidates that has led to the frequent use of one ‘quote’ that is often supposed to be representative of her feminism. This essay suggests that more attention should be paid to the whole of her personality. Her correspondence, which covers her entire life, allows for a more complete understanding of Van Zuylen as a person and as an author. These letters will soon be accessible online.

Partager et faire connaître l’héritage littéraire féminin

Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen, 1740-1805), classée en tête du « canon littéraire d’Utrecht », fait partie de l’héritage culturel néerlandais, malgré le fait qu’elle écrivait et publiait en français. La numérisation de sa correspondance était une initiative de l’Association Isabelle de Charrière, réalisée dans le contexte de l’Institut Huygens d’Histoire des Pays-Bas (Amsterdam). Sous la direction de Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau et de Suzan van Dijk, avec l’aide de Maria Schouten, un petit groupe de membres de cette Association s’est chargé de ce travail. Ils ont procédé au scannage des transcriptions (2552 lettres) contenues dans les six premiers volumes des Œuvres complètes, à l’OCR, puis à la transcription des textes, avec la modernisation de l’orthographe. Ils ont ajouté des métadonnées, et commencé à préparer des annotations explicatives, qui devraient rendre les textes accessibles à une audience plus large. Ces premiers travaux permettent déjà de procéder à un certain nombre de recherches sur des aspects précis des lettres et des correspondants grâce à la recherche par mots-clés. Pour faciliter l’étude ponctuelle de ce corpus, l’étape suivante est l’étiquetage d’éléments/passages pertinents par rapport à la personnalité de l’auteure et de ses préoccupations. Cet étiquetage servirait d’annotations dans le texte, et de catégories dans les bases de données comme le NEWW VRE, qui s’appuient sur des sources comme le sont ces correspondances privées – selon le principe qui avait été présenté en 2014 au colloque Digital Humanities de Lausanne.

Belle van Zuylen: schrijfster van adel, over de adel. Haar correspondentie digitaal beschikbaar

The Dutch-Swiss writer Belle de Zuylen/Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) was born in the Dutch noble family Van Tuyll van Serooskerken, but married (in 1771) outside of nobility. As a child she had a Swiss gouvernante, like so many children of the European elites, and in spite of being quite familiar also with the Dutch language, she would continue using French all her life, both for private correspondence and for her literary works. Most of these were published in Switzerland. Indeed, once she had married Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière, former tutor of her brothers, she went to live with him in his family house near Neuchâtel. This is where she started publishing and found recognition with her contemporary readers. In her novels and plays, she tends to confront characters representing different social classes – the reasons of which are often formulated in exchanges of letters with family members or friends who either helped her copying the texts, or were enthusiastic readers. As she wrote to her German translator, in these fictions she could illustrate the potential ‘nobility’ of the ‘so-called lower classes’. This is what she considered ‘her own democracy’.

Isabelle de Charrière and Skepticism in the Literary Life

This article explores some senses in which Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805) may be understood as a skeptic in her personal life and in her literary life, although the two cannot really be separated since she lived the literary life. She called herself a skeptic a number of times, and also showed some knowledge of the Academic or Socratic and especially of the Pyrrhonian traditions of skepticism in her novels and extensive correspondence. This Dutch-Swiss writer provides an example of what it might be to live as a skeptic, serving as a case study for the debates about the feasibility and moral status of living with skepticism.