Reframing Women’s Roles through the Lens of Madame de Sévigné: A Profile of Professor Nathalie Freidel.

Jan. 13, 2026

Story and interview by Patricia Goff, Associate Dean of Arts: External

When Professor Nathalie Freidel was growing up in Lyon, France, she wanted to be a high school teacher. Her longstanding interest in literature made teaching a natural way to pursue her passion professionally.

The path to a teaching job in France does not go through a teacher's college, as it does in Canada. Instead, aspiring teachers must sit national exams. The most ambitious pursue the agrégation, a prestigious and punishing competitive national exam that requires months of preparation and deep mastery of one’s subject. Indeed, the agrégation is a series of written and oral exams, preparation for which involves following a demanding syllabus of readings from canonical texts across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Many candidates don’t make it past the written component to qualify for the oral exams.

Successful completion of the exam – becoming agrégé – means that you are not only a teacher, but a civil servant in the French public education system, eligible for one of the relatively small number of teaching spots made available in any given year by the French Ministry of National Education from elementary school to university (a university post also requires a PhD).

That Professor Freidel passed the agrégation and became a high school teacher is certainly noteworthy, though perhaps not the most interesting part of this story. The most interesting part for our purposes is the fact that Professor Freidel’s own work subsequently appeared on the required reading list for those seeking the agrégation. This honour and recognition made her early work (Public et privé dans la Correspondance de Madame de Sévigné, Honoré Champion, 2009) a definitive reference in her field. Professor Freidel’s follow-up work, including her edition of The Selected Letters of Madame de Sévigné (Lettres Choisies) (Gallimard 2016), sold thousands of copies, a remarkable feat for an academic publication.

A turning point in Professor Freidel’s development came when she discovered the subject of so much of her scholarly work – Madame de Sévigné. Part of Professor Freidel’s intensive preparation for the agrégation involved translating texts from Latin and Greek into French. While she was doing this work, she met a professor, Jean Pierre Landry, who encouraged her to pursue her master’s and doctoral studies. Professor Landry helped to change the course of Professor Freidel’s career. During her studies, Professor Freidel encountered the works of Madame de Sévigné, a 17th-century femme de lettres. She also encountered what had long served as the canonical interpretation of her works by Roger Duchesne. Something did not sit right with Professor Freidel in reading Duchesne’s interpretation.

Madame de Sévigné is well known in France and among scholars of French classics and literature for her three-volume anthology of letters. Professor Freidel notes that Madame de Sévigné had been a part of the canon, but she was regarded in a very specific way. In particular, she had been seen as a mother figure but not a literary figure, despite her prolific epistolary works. Indeed, the 2023 film, Madame de Sévigné, which appeared in wide release across Europe, depicts her not as a literary figure but as a difficult mother who maintains a correspondence with her daughter. A review of the film in the French magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, takes issue with the depiction that it counsels readers to read Madame de Sévigné’s letters rather than viewing the film.

Indeed, much of Professor Freidel’s work is directed toward changing the perception of Madame de Sévigné from that of a mother figure to “tell the story of a woman who built a literary career when it was not a given.” Sévigné’s time was an interesting one for women with intellectual and literary ambitions. On one hand, they were excluded from official institutions (the “academies”). On the other hand, they initiated their own semi-public spaces (the “salons”) where they could participate in literary discussions, debate, and creation. Sévigné and many of her peers benefited from these opportunities to access and participate in the culture of her era. Freidel’s work shows that Sévigné should be viewed as a literary figure offering a critical perspective on women’s experience during her time. Indeed, Madame de Sévigné’s own grandmother, Sainte Jeanne de Chantal, paved the way for her with her epistolary theological works.

Professor Freidel has published many more works on Madame de Sévigné since her first book, including her last monograph: Le Temps des écriveuses. L’œuvre pionnière des épistolières au XVIIe siècle (Classiques Garnier, 2022). By showing how epistolary skills are part of a culture acquired and transmitted by women in family and social contexts, she argues that letter-writing played an essential role in enabling women to access knowledge and culture. This work provides a wider context in which Sévigné appears not as an exception but as one among many women writers of her time, willing to make abundant use of the narrow opportunities available to them. This recognition prompts us to rethink the place of women and women’s history from social and historical perspectives.

Freidel’s works are widely cited and assigned by colleagues across North America and Europe. In addition to her written works, Professor Freidel has collaborated on an SSHRC-funded digital database that serves as an archive of women’s epistolary works as well as a tool to visualize epistolary networks. She regularly hears from students and colleagues around the world who use it in their research. Scholarship on Sévigné continues to flourish, and Professor Freidel often serves on PhD defence juries around the world.

This year will, in many respects, be a culminating year for Professor Freidel’s work and for Madame de Sévigné. 2026 marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Madame de Sévigné. This important milestone will be marked with a major exhibit at the Musée de Carnavalet in Paris, which Professor Freidel is co-curating. The museum, located on Sévigné Street in the third arrondissement, is dedicated to the history of the city of Paris. The oldest museum in Paris, it counts among its many attributes that Madame de Sévigné and her family lived there for close to twenty years in the late 17th century.

The exhibit will run from April 15 to August 23 and feature more than 200 works (manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, musical instruments, furniture, and décor) that evoke Sévigné’s life and work in Paris at a time when the French capital was undergoing a major transformation. The exhibit will be a very important opportunity to change the public’s understanding of Madame de Sévigné, reaching so many more people than scholarly works typically do. Professor Freidel is eager to “make women from this era visible” in their wholeness as women and as femmes de lettres.

Professor Freidel has made sure that her students will benefit from this milestone. She will take a travel course to France in June 2026: FR289: Paris was a woman. Students will enjoy a range of activities, including a private guided tour of Versailles with one of the palace’s curators. In addition, Laurier students will be the guests of honour at the Sévigné exhibit and will attend two days of conferences organized by Professor Freidel at the Carnavalet museum: “Paris, cité des femmes au temps de Sévigné” (Women in Paris in Sévigné’s time).

Professor Freidel’s journey is a powerful example of the transformative impact of literary research on our understanding of the past and of the narratives that give meaning to historical figures and ideas.

Would you like to read more? You can access Professor Freidel’s latest article here.