L’‘Histoire de ma littérature’ de Mme d’Arconville (1720-1805): Ecriture de soi et généalogie d’une personnalité intellectuelle

Abstract: Mme d’Arconville stands out amongst eighteenth-century women of letters be-cause she combined the practice of literature with the more unexpected study of science.When at the end of a very long life she returns to what she calls the‘story of her head’, theanecdotes she recounts constitute a genealogy of her thought stemming from her child-hood’s encyclopaedic curiosity. This essay examines this intellectual narrative throughtwo unpublished autobiographical manuscripts written around1803: the‘Histoire dema littérature’and‘Mes souvenirs’. These are less concerned with rooting identity inan intimate sense of self than with investigating the genealogy of what would later becalled anintellectual personality. Her autobiographical writing thus invites us to rediscovera world both within and outside the self and makes it not only possible to retrace the in-tellectual history of a woman, but also to apprehend experiences from the period’svastnetworks of sociability