Faith E. Beasley is associate professor of French at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-Century France (1990) and of articles on seventeenth-century French women writers, the salons, and the development of literary taste during the seventeenth century. She is writing a book on the role of the seventeenth century in the creation of France's national identity.

Katharine Ann Jensen is associate professor of French and of women's and gender studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605-1776 (1995) and of various articles on women writers in ancient régime France. She is working on a book on famous women's accounts of mother-daughter relations in French literature from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century.