nigh obsolete less than a decade after its appearance. I have wit-
nessed all this with the satisfaction of someone who bets on a dark
horse without quite knowing why, only to learn that she has indeed
chosen a winner.

Nevertheless, although I have been gratified by the queen of
Navarre's belated entry into the canon, I have also been dismayed
that in many cases those who now extol her merits also tend to mute
and cover over her gender, as well as her preoccupation with issues
that today we would call feminist. It is as if she were admitted to
membership in the club only on condition that she dress like a man.
What is more, despite the fact that she has always been acknowl-
edged as a foremother of feminism, a woman who wrote as a woman
about women's estate, there has never been a full-length feminist
study of the book that concentrates on feminist questions.

There are, of course, many nonfeminist attempts to explain the
Heptaméron, but although all of them offer valuable insights into
certain aspects of the text, they inevitably deal superficially with
many others. The most thorough is still unquestionably Jourda's
two-volume examination of Marguerite's life and work. More re-
cently, Nicole Cazauran has treated the Heptaméron's themes and
narrative techniques with fairness and intelligence. Gelernt, Reyn-
olds, and Tetel have also explored it from structural or thematic
points of view. However, for a variety of reasons, none of them
produces a satisfactory reading of this elusive text. The book is so
long and so complex that any effort to deal with it in its entirety
becomes a cursory catalog of plots and a series of quotations out of
context. Then too, as many scholars have pointed out, it is endlessly
dialogic, and the authorial voice is extremely hard to identify. More-
over, the author's female gender problematizes her relationship to
words and plot.

My own approach has been different. I have not attempted to
pronounce the final word on a book so richly layered that it never
yields all its secrets to any reader. This study began with my search
for difference in women's writing. Having devoted much time to
the Heptaméron as a graduate student without exhausting its possi-
bilities or producing anything of much originality, I was engaged
in research on female autobiographies as the scene of feminine

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