Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse Reading Order

Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Eloise, 1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century — overtaking even Richardson's Clarissa in popularity across Europe — and the foundational text of literary Sentimentalism. Julie d'Etange and her tutor Saint-Preux fall into a passionate correspondence (the novel is epistolary) that cannot be consummated because of the social gulf between them; Julie is eventually married by her father to the older, virtuous Wolmar, and Saint-Preux must learn to live with a love that has been sublimated into friendship and philosophy. The novel is structured as a moral education as much as a love story: Rousseau uses the letters to enact his political and philosophical ideas about nature, society, virtue, and the corruption of Parisian civilization. Rousseau himself called it 'my greatest work and my finest' — the one in which he most fully dramatized the conflict between natural virtue and social corruption that animates all his political philosophy. The Alpine landscape of the Vaud and the simplicity of rural Swiss life are contrasted throughout with the corrupting influence of Paris and aristocratic society. The novel had an enormous influence on Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther), on the Romantic movement generally, and on the European novel's engagement with landscape, feeling, and the interior life. It is also a direct influence on the modern literary category of 'nature writing' through its sustained attention to the Alpine landscape as a moral and emotional environment.