La Vie de Marianne Reading Order

La Vie de Marianne (The Life of Marianne, 1731–42) by Pierre de Marivaux is the most psychologically penetrating French novel of the first half of the eighteenth century and a direct ancestor of Stendhal's analysis of self-consciousness in love. Marianne is an orphan of unknown origin who arrives in Paris with nothing and must make her way through a society that judges everything by birth and money; the novel follows her navigation of this world through a series of benefactors, suitors, religious retreats, and social encounters, told in her own voice as an old woman looking back on her youth. The key to the novel is Marianne's self-awareness: she knows she is beautiful, she knows how she affects people, and she observes her own responses to situations with a lucidity that Marivaux's contemporary critics found disturbing and his successors found formative. Marivaux was primarily a playwright — his comedies for the Comédie-Italienne invented the genre of the 'marivaudage' (a delicate, ironic, self-conscious dialogue of love) — and the novelistic Marianne has the same quality of theatrical self-observation. The novel was never completed (it was published in installments from 1731 to 1742 and then abandoned), but its eleven published parts are sufficient to establish Marianne as one of the defining voices in the French novel before the Revolution. Rousseau admired it; Stendhal learned from it; Proust's Albertine is unthinkable without it.