HÉLOÏSE

French nun, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse is accorded an important place in French literary history and in the development of feminist representation. While few of her letters survive, those that do have been considered a foundational "monument" of French literature from the late thirteenth century onwards. Her correspondence, more erudite than it is erotic, is the Latin basis for the bildungsroman and a model of the classical epistolary genre, which influenced writers as diverse as Madame de Lafayette, Choderlos de Laclos, Voltaire, Rousseau, Simone Weil and Dominique Aury. Although she was known primarily as a poet, some musical works have been attributed to her.