A novel of moral philosophy set against the upheaval of the French Revolution
What the Work Is
Three Women (originally Trois Femmes) is a novel by the Dutch-Swiss Enlightenment writer Isabelle de Charrière, published in installments between 1795 and 1798. Written in French during the turbulent years of the French Revolution, the work stands among the author’s most significant literary achievements. De Charrière, who spent the latter half of her life in Neuchâtel, was already known for her epistolary novels and sharp social observation when she turned to this more ambitious fictional project.
What the Book Is About
The novel centers on three women—Emilie, Constance, and Josephine—who are forced to navigate a world turned upside down by revolutionary upheaval. As aristocrats displaced by political turmoil, they must confront fundamental questions about morality, virtue, and survival in circumstances where traditional social structures have collapsed. The book uses their intersecting stories to explore whether moral principles can be maintained when the conditions that once supported them no longer exist.
At its heart, Three Women is a philosophical novel that tests the limits of ethical behavior. The characters find themselves in situations where conventional morality seems inadequate or even impossible to follow, raising the question of whether virtue is absolute or relative to circumstance. De Charrière uses her fictional framework to examine what happens when people are forced to choose between principle and necessity.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central philosophical concern of Three Women is the tension between moral absolutes and practical realities. De Charrière presents her characters with dilemmas that have no clean solutions, suggesting that ethical life is far more complicated than simple rules might suggest. The novel engages with Enlightenment debates about virtue, particularly the question of whether morality can be grounded in reason alone or must accommodate human weakness and circumstance.
The theme of female agency runs throughout the work. The three title characters each respond differently to their constrained circumstances, and through them De Charrière explores the limited options available to women in a society where their fates were largely determined by marriage, family, and economic dependency. The Revolution, while disrupting the old order, does not automatically create new possibilities for women; instead, it often leaves them more vulnerable.
The novel also reflects De Charrière’s critical perspective on the aristocratic émigrés who fled the Revolution. Having observed such refugees in Neuchâtel, she was struck by how many of them seemed to have learned nothing from their experiences. The book implicitly criticizes those who clung to their former privileges and prejudices rather than adapting to a changed world.
Another significant dimension of the work is its treatment of slavery and colonialism. De Charrière mentions slavery in the novel without explicit condemnation, a fact that has drawn scholarly attention. However, her correspondence from the same period reveals that she was deeply troubled by what she called the “horrors” of the colonies. This discrepancy between the novel’s relatively muted treatment and her private expressions of horror has become a point of interest for scholars examining her attitudes toward the colonial enterprise.
Structure and Approach
Three Women was published in parts, appearing first in 1795 and then in expanded form in 1798. The novel is attributed in its subtitle to “the abbé de la Tour,” a fictional narrator whose identity adds another layer of complexity to the work. This framing device allows De Charrière to maintain a certain distance from the controversial ideas her characters explore.
The book combines narrative fiction with philosophical dialogue, a structure that reflects De Charrière’s interest in the intellectual currents of her time. Her approach is less concerned with plot for its own sake than with using situations and conversations to work through moral questions. The characters serve as vehicles for different positions in an ongoing debate about how one ought to live when the old certainties have been swept away.
Significance and Influence
Three Women is regarded as one of the most interesting works De Charrière produced during the period of the French Revolution, an era that sharpened her political and social commentary. The novel’s engagement with moral philosophy places it within the broader Enlightenment project of questioning received wisdom and examining the foundations of ethical life.
The work has gained renewed attention in recent decades as scholars have revisited women writers of the eighteenth century. Its translation into English by Emma Rooksby, published by the Modern Language Association of America in 2007, has made the novel accessible to a wider readership and contributed to its place in discussions of Enlightenment literature and feminist thought. The questions it raises about virtue, circumstance, and the position of women in times of social transformation continue to resonate with contemporary readers interested in how individuals navigate moral complexity.
The English translation of Three Women by Emma Rooksby was published by the Modern Language Association of America in 2007. This edition is titled Three women. A novel by the abbé de la Tour and runs to xii, 176 pages with the ISBN 9780873529419. The attribution to “the abbé de la Tour” in the English title matches the subtitle of the original French work.
Author’s Broader Context
De Charrière’s literary output extended well beyond Three Women. Her first novel, Le Noble, was published anonymously in 1763 when she was 22 years old. This satire against the nobility was withdrawn from sale by her parents after her identity was discovered. She also wrote a self-portrait titled Portrait de Mll de Z., sous le nom de Zélide, fait par elle-même in 1762. In 1784, she published two epistolary novels, Lettres neuchâteloises and Lettres de Mistriss Henley publiées par son amie. Her first pamphlets on the political situation in the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland appeared in 1788.
De Charrière was an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and assisted in the posthumous publication of his Confessions in 1789. She also wrote her own pamphlets on Rousseau around that time. Her most productive period came only after she had been living in Colombier for several years. Themes in her work included her religious doubts, the nobility, and the upbringing of women.
The Author’s Life and Background
Isabelle de Charrière was born Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serooskerken on 20 October 1740 in Zuylen Castle in Zuilen near Utrecht, Netherlands. She was the eldest of seven children of Diederik Jacob van Tuyll van Serooskerken and Jacoba Helena de Vicq. In 1750, she was sent to Geneva and traveled through Switzerland and France with her French-speaking governess Jeanne-Louise Prevost, who taught her from 1746 to 1753. After speaking only French for a year, she had to relearn Dutch on returning home, though French remained her preferred language for the rest of her life.
Her education was broader than was usual for girls at that time, including mathematics, physics, and languages such as Latin, Italian, German, and English. In 1771, she married Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière de Penthaz, who had been the private tutor of her brother Willem René abroad from 1763 to 1766. The couple settled at Le Pontet in Colombier, near Neuchâtel, with her father-in-law and two unmarried sisters-in-law. The Principality of Neuchâtel was then ruled by Frederick the Great as prince of Neuchâtel in personal union with Prussia.
Financial Circumstances and Colonial Investments
In 1778, De Charrière became wealthy by modern standards by partly inheriting the fortunes of her parents. This inheritance included nearly 40% investments in colonial companies such as the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, and the South Sea Company, all of which depended on profitable overseas slavery in plantations. Within five years of her inheritance, De Charrière sold 70% of her colonial investments.
According to Drieënhuizen and Douze in their 2021 publication, De Charrière mentioned slavery uncritically in her letters and in Trois Femmes. However, the opposite was the case in a letter (number 1894, of 1798) where she wrote about what she called the “horrors” (horreurs) in the colonies. This was detailed by Suzan van Dijk, the editor of her correspondence, indicating she was not indifferent to the excesses of slavery.
Correspondence and Intellectual Circle
De Charrière maintained an extensive correspondence with numerous intellectuals, including David-Louis Constant d’Hermenches, James Boswell, Benjamin Constant, and her German translator Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. She met Constant d’Hermenches in 1760, and after a second meeting two years later, she began an intimate and secret correspondence with him that lasted about 15 years. The Scottish writer James Boswell met her frequently in Utrecht and Castle Zuylen in 1763-1764 while studying law at Utrecht University. He called her Zélide, like in her self-portrait.
In 1786, she met Constant d’Hermenches’ nephew, the writer Benjamin Constant, in Paris. He visited her in Colombier several times, where they wrote an epistolary novel together. An exchange of letters between them lasted until the end of her life. She also corresponded with her young friends Henriette L’Hardy and Isabelle Morel. Huber’s young stepdaughter Therese Forster lived with her from 1801 until De Charrière’s death.
Musical Works
De Charrière’s musical works are in volume 10 of her Œuvres complètes. These include Six minuets pour deux violons, alto et basse [i.e., string quartet], dedicated to Monsieur le Baron de Tuyll de Serooskerken Seigneur de Zuylen, published in 1786; 9 Sonates voor klavecimbel; and 10 Airs et Romances published in Paris in 1788-1789, for which she wrote both poetry and music. Most of her music was performed in the private circle of her salon at Le Pontet. An opéra-bouffe, a Dutch adaptation of her novel Le noble titled De Deugd is den Adel waerdig (Vertu vaut bien noblesse), was performed in the Fransche Comedie theater in The Hague on 2 March 1769, her only stage work performed during her lifetime. Both libretto and music are considered lost. She sent a libretto of Les Phéniciennes to Mozart in Salzburg while he was living in Vienna, hoping he would write music for it, but no reply is known.
