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Voyage de Sophie et d’Eulalie, au Palais du vrai bonheur; ouvrage pour servir de guide dans les voies du salut: par une jeune demoiselle.

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First edition of this rare utopian voyage to the Palace of True Happiness, written by a woman for a readership of women, our copy with the eighteenth-century ownership inscription of a female reader.

In the author’s note, Loquet (b. 1750) states that she wrote ‘this pious fiction’ at the age of fifteen, and hopes that the reader will excuse ‘her sex and her age’, though the novel went through some mature reworking before publication. The peculiarity of it being a work written by a very young woman explicitly for ladies is remarked upon by the publisher, who describes it as ‘a completely new work, not in terms of doctrine but in terms of its method of treating it’ (trans.). He sees in the book the multifarious appeals of the best novels: interesting turns of events, moral instruction and inspirational characters; and he prepares the reader to enjoy an imaginative style rich with ‘ingenious emblems, allegorical figures, poetical descriptions, and simple and pathetic discourses’ (trans.).

The book enjoyed enduring success and repeated editions for three decades; it was later translated into English as The Journey of Sophie and Eulalie to the Palace of True Happiness (1873). This was Loquet’s first published novel; in the same year, she also published Entretiens d’Angélique, pour exciter les jeunes personnes du sexe à l’amour et à la pratique de la vertu, likewise published by Berton, who hopes in the preface to the present work that it may be even more useful. She went on to write a number of anti-Enlightenment works, including Cruzamante ou la sainte Amante de la Croix (1786).

OCLC finds only four copies, of which two in the US (Berkeley, Chicago); Library Hub adds a single copy in the UK, at the British Library.

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