Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse Reading Order

Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the best-selling novel of the 18th century — the epistolary tale of Julie d'Étange and her tutor Saint-Preux, their illicit love, Julie's marriage to the virtuous Wolmar, the social experiment of Clarens, and Julie's death — that made Rousseau simultaneously the most read and most controversial author in Europe. The novel is written in letters and explicitly recalls Abelard and Heloise (the subtitle) while departing from their medieval relationship in every significant way: Saint-Preux is not a great philosopher but an ordinary sensitive young man; Julie is not a passive victim but the moral center of the novel; and the relationship, after its transgressive beginning, is transformed into a virtuous social community. Rousseau's genius is to make virtue emotionally attractive — the second half of the novel, set at Clarens under Wolmar's management, is the most sustained and detailed Utopian community in 18th-century fiction, and Julie's death scene is one of the most elaborately prepared emotional moments in the history of the novel. The novel produced an unprecedented quantity of fan mail — readers wrote to Rousseau to ask if Julie was real, to confess their identification with Saint-Preux, and to report being unable to stop crying — and established the sentimental novel as the dominant literary form of the late 18th century.