Recommendations
Books Like Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
Books for readers who loved Rousseau's epistolary Sentimental masterpiece
Rousseau's 1761 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse — the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century — follows Julie and Saint-Preux's impossible love sublimated into virtue through 225 letters. These eight books share its qualities: the epistolary novel as moral drama, the conflict between nature and society, and the Sentimental tradition in which feeling is itself a moral faculty.
- 1
Buy on AmazonClarissa
by Samuel Richardson
The great English parallel — Richardson's Clarissa is the virtuous woman fighting off the libertine Lovelace across 1500 pages of letters; the English counterpart to Julie's French Sentimental tradition.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe was directly inspired by Julie — Werther's hopeless love for the unavailable Lotte, his retreat into Alpine nature, and his final suicide are Julie's emotional world pushed to its Romantic extreme.
- 3
Buy on AmazonPamela
by Samuel Richardson
The epistolary novel of virtue and social pressure that Rousseau had read before writing Julie — Pamela Andrews's letters defending her virtue provide the epistolary model.
- 4
Buy on AmazonPaul et Virginie
by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
The direct French descendant of Julie — two children raised in nature on a tropical island, doomed by the corruption of European society when Virginia is sent back to France; pure Rousseauian sentiment.
- 5
Buy on AmazonLes Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau's autobiography reveals the personal sources of Julie's landscapes and feelings — the Julie he was in love with himself, the Alpine countryside, the impossible social distances; essential companion.
- 6
Buy on AmazonAtala
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's American pastoral — two lovers among the Natchez tribe, doomed by Christianity and social law; the most direct Romantic-era descendant of Julie's nature-versus-civilization tragedy.
- 7
Buy on AmazonSense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen
Austen knows the Sentimental tradition from the inside and her Marianne Dashwood is a comic critique of Rousseauian sensibility — reading Julie alongside Austen shows exactly what Austen is both inheriting and debunking.
- 8
Buy on AmazonTess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A woman destroyed by the conflict between natural innocence and social convention — Hardy's tragic structure is the nineteenth-century heir of Rousseau's argument about the corruption of natural virtue by society.
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