Book excerpt: "This study will particularly appeal to scholars of gender studies, but will also interest eighteenth-century specialists, reader-response critics, and any critic interested in the epistolary genre. Dr. McAlpin compares the evidence of de La Tour's authorial consciousness with that of far better known letter writers, both women (Sevigne, Graffigny, Lespinasse, Roland, Suzanne Necker) and men (Boswell, in particular). The book also introduces the exchange of letters to the English-speaking community of eighteenth-century scholars. While the de La Tour-Rousseau exchange was republished in French in 1998, it is not yet available in English. This book provides translations of the first, most significant letters in its appendix."--BOOK JACKET.