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Florine and Boca: Tales of Faerie

by Françoise Le Marchand
adapted by Brian Stableford

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Françoise le Marchand deserves to be reckoned a significant, if slightly shadowy, figure in the revival of contes de fées in 1730s and 1740s France.

It is not obvious why either of the two novellas translated here, Florine (1713) and Boca (1735) had to be published illicitly, but it undoubtedly reflects the fact that the genre was effectively under a royal ban in the aftermath of the scandal that had caused Louis XIV to break up the coterie of female writers who pioneered it. Le Marchand could not have been unaware of the fact that the scandal involved allegations of lesbianism, and the two works presented here contain odd features, which might not be unconnected with that context.

While a little eccentric in their construction, both works stand out for their imaginative imagery.

CONTENTS:
Florine; or, The Italian Beauty (1713)
Boca; or, Virtue Recompensed (1735)
The Story of Princess Abdelazis
Introduction and Notes by Brian Stableford.

Cover by Mike Hoffman

Published by Black Coat Press in November 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61227-810-0

The Brian Stableford Website