L’‘Histoire de ma littérature’ de Mme d’Arconville (1720‐1805): Ecriture de soi et généalogie d’une personnalité intellectuelle

Mme d’Arconville stands out amongst eighteenth‐century women of letters because she combined the practice of literature with the more unexpected study of science. When at the end of a very long life she returns to what she calls the ‘story of her head’, the anecdotes she recounts constitute a genealogy of her thought stemming from her childhood’s encyclopaedic curiosity. This essay examines this intellectual narrative through two unpublished autobiographical manuscripts written around 1803: the ‘Histoire de ma littérature’ and ‘Mes souvenirs’. These are less concerned with rooting identity in an intimate sense of self than with investigating the genealogy of what would later be called an intellectual personality. Her autobiographical writing thus invites us to rediscover a world both within and outside the self and makes it not only possible to retrace the intellectual history of a woman, but also to apprehend experiences from the period’s vast networks of sociability.