La Nouvelle Héloïse Reading Order

Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most widely read novel of the eighteenth century — a vast epistolary novel in the tradition of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, following the love of the young tutor Saint-Preux for his aristocratic student Julie d'Étange, their forbidden relationship, Julie's marriage to the older nobleman Wolmar, and the strange ménage à trois that Wolmar creates by inviting Saint-Preux into his household while Julie transforms her former passion into a model of Christian virtue and domestic order. The novel is remarkable in the history of French fiction for the emotional intensity of its first part and the philosophical ambition of its second: the early love letters between Saint-Preux and Julie are among the most passionate in the French tradition, and the later sections of the novel (in which Wolmar supervises the conversion of Saint-Preux's passion into friendship under the eyes of Julie-as-virtue) are the fullest exposition of Rousseau's moral philosophy in fictional form. La Nouvelle Héloïse was the single most read novel of the pre-Revolutionary period; Diderot, d'Alembert, and the entire philosophe circle, despite their disagreements with Rousseau, were moved by it; and it inaugurated the French tradition of the sentimental novel that would run through Chateaubriand, Constant, and George Sand.