Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an orig

The World of the Salons is a revisionist study of the French salon of the eighteenth century, arguing that it was a place governed by social hierarchy, not equa

Now in paperback, an award-winning look at French salons and the women who presided over them In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of

The first half of the book is a detailed study of how the salons influenced the development of literature. Beasley argues that many women were not only writers,