French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.

In 1756 Charlotte Lennox, already a celebrated novelist—she had just published her most renowned work, The Female Quixote, a year before—translated from the original French one of the most successful novels written by Madame Claudine Gérin, the marquise de Tencin, Mémoires du comte de Comminge (1735). At the time, Madame de Tencin was a controversial public figure, an intellectual woman and one of the most distinguished salonnières in eighteenth-century France. Although Tencin’s name as the authoress of the novel was kept secret until after her death, notwithstanding the outstanding success of her Mémoires, Charlotte Lennox knew that the novel had been penned by a woman and decided to translate it and later serialize it in her feminist magazine The Lady’s Museum, a periodical wholly devoted to women’s literary and cultural education. Lennox’s translation of Tencin’s short novel is here reprinted for the first time after two centuries with critical notes and an introduction, in an edition that takes into account a close comparison between Lennox’s translation and Madame de Tencin’s original French version, and analyses all the variations and addenda that appeared in Lennox’s own version of The History of the Count de Comminge.