Recommendations
Books Like La Religieuse
Best books to read after La Religieuse by Diderot
Diderot's La Religieuse (written c.1780, published posthumously 1796) follows Suzanne Simonin, a woman forced into a convent against her will, through a series of abusive and psychologically complex relationships with her superiors. One of the most disturbing novels in the French tradition, and a devastating attack on forced religious vows, it is remarkable for its sustained first-person voice and its study of a consciousness shaped entirely by an institution it cannot see outside of.
- 1Buy
Le Neveu de Rameau
by Denis Diderot
The companion philosophical masterpiece — where La Religieuse shows Diderot's intelligence in sustained narrative form, Le Neveu de Rameau shows it in the dialogue at its most playful, and the two together define the range of his achievement in prose.
- 2Buy
Jacques le fataliste et son maître
by Denis Diderot
Diderot's anti-novel — formally experimental and philosophically complementary, the conversations between Jacques and his master show the same intelligence that produces La Religieuse at work on an entirely different formal and tonal problem.
- 3Buy
La Faute de l'abbé Mouret
by Émile Zola
Zola's most extreme engagement with religious repression and sexual desire — the story of the young priest Serge Mouret's destruction through love for Albine is the most powerful Naturalist successor to La Religieuse's attack on the institution of the Church as a system of sexual repression.
- 4Buy
Le Rouge et le Noir
by Stendhal
Stendhal's study of Julien Sorel — the young man shaped by the Church and the army as institutions he serves without believing in — is the most important nineteenth-century successor to La Religieuse's portrait of consciousness constrained and distorted by an institution.
- 5Buy
La Princesse de Clèves
by Madame de Lafayette
The essential predecessor in the French tradition of the woman constrained by an institution (the court, the marriage, the convent) who analyzes her own constraint with extraordinary precision — La Religieuse's Suzanne is the most extreme case in the tradition Lafayette inaugurates.
- 6Buy
Les Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau's autobiography is the most important contemporary contrast to La Religieuse — where Suzanne cannot understand the systems that shape her, Rousseau insists on his own transparent self-knowledge, and the comparison defines the range of Enlightenment attitudes toward self-understanding.
- 7Buy
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's great novel of confinement and false institutional authority — the women confined in asylums and under legal guardianship are the Victorian English parallel to Suzanne confined in the convent, and the sensation-novel form shows a different way of processing the same material.
- 8Buy
Manon Lescaut
by Abbé Prévost
The founding eighteenth-century French novel of a woman whose social situation exceeds any of the institutions designed to contain her — Manon's indifference to the institutions of virtue that constrain women in her world parallels Suzanne's refusal to accept the institution of forced vows that constrains her.
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