“Letters of a Peruvian Woman”

Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive.

Zilia was not real, but the imaginative creation of Françoise de Gaffigny, an aristocratic salon hostess, intellectual, and writer during the 18th-century French Enlightenment. But Zilia’s story became wildly popular — Gaffigny created the character to star in her novel _Letters of a Peruvian Woman_, written in 1747.

Although Gaffigny did historical research in providing background to Zilia’s story, the author’s plot also created a means of critiquing her own French society. She focused particularly on the treatment of women, condemning the lack of educational opportunities and agency in directing their lives.

The novel made Gaffigny the world’s best-known woman writer at the time, and within a year _Letters_ appeared in fourteen editions and was quickly translated into many languages.

Gaffigny’s work commands respect in how it used an engaging plot to extol the importance of reason for women. For instance, Zilia let it be known that as a woman she was expected to be a weaver, but readers learn that the weaving means more than it seems — she weaves knots as an Incan way of writing, and then uses writing to learn French. Reading French becomes her ticket to knowledge, and Zilia surprised readers of her story by choosing to remain a single woman in a private abode with all the books she wants rather than take a marriage proposal.

In a final passage relaying Zilia’s happy ending, the author muses on what brings happiness: “the pleasure of being — a forgotten pleasure not even known to so many blind humans — that thought sweet, that happiness so pure, ‘I am, I live, I exist,’ could bring happiness all by itself if one remembered it, if one enjoyed it, if one treasured it as befits its worth”.

And why not read that last line in the French, ’cause it’s so darn beautiful: “Le plaisir d’être; ce plaisir oublié, ignoré même de tant d’aveugles humains; cette pensée si douce, ce bonheur si pur, ‘je suis, je vis, j’existe, pourrait seul rendre heureux, si l’on s’en souvenait, si l’on en jouissait, si l’on en connaissait le prix.”