Translating Ovid

This chapter treats two fictional versions—histoires galantes—of the story of Ovid’s life: Madame de Villedieu’s Les Exilez de la cour d’Auguste (1672–8) and Anne de la Roche-Guilhen’s Histoire des Favorites (1697). It develops two main arguments: first that Ovid’s sociable love poetry, and his avowed use of a pseudonym for his mistress, made him appeal to a female-orientated literary culture and à clé reading and writing practices. To support this, it briefly explores uses of the figure of Ovid in works of other women writers. Second, it suggests that the mystery at the heart of Ovid’s exile allowed both Villedieu and La Roche-Guilhen to offer an imagined version of what happened to the court poet, which entails exploration of the boundaries between history and fiction and the processes behind official historiography. This, in turn, allowed both writers to reflect on the genre of the histoire galante.