The story of Françoise de Graffigny’s life reads like a novel. Following a disastrous marriage, she was forced by political upheavals to leave her native Lorraine and move to Paris, where she struggled to survive against poverty and persecution. Here she made her way into the heart of literary society in the heyday of the Enlightenment, wrote a novel – the Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747) – that made her an international celebrity, wrote a play – Cénie (1750) – that ranked among the ten most successful new plays of the century, and became a noted salon hostess. Yet fifty...