She received, by her father’s wish—a marshal and governor of Le Havre—an excellent education under the guidance of Father Rapin and Gilles Ménage, and soon distinguished herself within the learned society of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. In 1655 she married the Count of La F., François Motier; through her sister-in-law (Mère Angélique) she entered into relations with Henrietta of England, of whom she served as lady-in-waiting for a decade. United by tender friendship with Madame de Sévigné, she composed a Portrait of her (1659), which was her first published work; this was followed by several love stories that rank among the deepest studies of the feminine soul in seventeenth-century France: La Princesse de Montpensier (1662), Zayde (1670), La Princesse de Clèves (1678), and La Comtesse de Tende (published posthumously in the Mercure de France, 1724). Deprived in 1680 of La Rochefoucauld’s friendship and in 1683 of her husband, she spent her final years in the company of her old teacher Ménage and the ecclesiastics Rancé and Duguet, devoting herself to memoirs on the persons and events she had encountered: Histoire de Mme Henriette d’Angleterre and Mémoires de la Cour de France pour les années 1688 et 1689 (posthumous, 1720 and 1731).
LA FAYETTE, MARIE-MADELEINE DE
BIBL.: Edizioni: Oeuvres complètes, 3 voll., Paris 1925-30. Studi: M. Crawford, M.me de la F. and her family, New York 1908; H. Ashton, M.me de la F., Cambridge 1922; E. Magne, M.me de la F. en ménage and Le coeur et l'esprit de M.me de la F., Paris 1926-27; F. Neri, La vera La F., in Il maggio delle fate ed altri scritti di letteratura francese, Novara 1929, pp. 101-23; H. Bordeaux, En relisant la «Princesse de Clèves», in Rev. de France, 2 (1933), pp. 552-62.