SOURCE: “The Rape of Lucretia in Madeleine de Scudéry's Clélie,” in Violence et fiction jusqu'à la Révolution, edited by Martine Debaisieux and Gabrille Verdier, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998, pp. 245-49.

In the following essay, Nunn examines Scudéry's adaptations of Livy's story of the rape of Lucretia, both in Les femmes illustres and in Clélie. The critic finds that Scudéry's presentation of the rape is restrained by the culture of polite society that suffuses her historical novels.

The rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquin and her subsequent suicide is one of the most well-known legends of antiquity. Over the centuries it has inspired numerous works of art and literature throughout Europe. In seventeenth-century France, Madeleine de Scudéry treated the story twice, the first time in 1642, when she and her brother George devoted one of their Harangues des femmes illustres to a speech addressed...