TRANSLATED BY A WOMAN FOR A FEMALE FRIEND
FLORIAN, Jean-Pierre Claris de.
‘Stella a pastoral Romance … Translated from the French’.
[?England, early nineteenth century.]
Manuscript on paper, 4to, pp. [iv], 152, [2]; in a neat hand in brown ink, with head- and tail-pieces in ink and wash; a cut paper silhouette portrait pasted in at the front; in very good condition, bound in contemporary black sheep, gilt, borders roll-tooled in gilt, spine gilt in compartments with sunbursts and the same roll tool, lettered directly ‘Gage d’Amitié’, green marbled endpapers.
An apparently unpublished manuscript translation of Florian’s popular romance Estelle (1788), a pastoral set in the Cévennes in the fifteenth century; it is in prose but regularly interspersed with poetry. There were two published English translations: Stella, a pastoral Romance (1791), by Elizabeth Morgan, and Estelle (1798) by Susanna Cummyng – the text here is different from both of these, but the originator was again a woman. The vignette illustrations include a cupid riding a lion, flowers, harps, and agricultural tools.
Prefatory to the translation is an original poem – ‘Go book, and pour in Ellen’s ear / The pages I have written here’ – signed by the translator ‘M. F.’. She asks the recipient to forgive its faults: ‘How could she this translation make / Without a blot or a mistake’ when every time ‘a passage did perplex, / And with its difficulties vex, / Thy image would intrude’.
A highspot in its genre in France, Estelle, published in the same year that Florian was elected to the Academie Française, was very successful, with several editions within the first year. The theme was self-sacrifice, firstly of Estelle, who agrees to marry the shepherd Méril against her heart because he rescued her father, and then of Méril, who lays down his own life in battle so that she might marry her love Némorin.
