Female figures

Female figures run through the antiquarian book trade in many forms: correspondence by women of letters or women artists, first editions from their own pen, works devoted to them, engraved portraits or inscriptions that recall their presence in intellectual and artistic life. The subject thus unfolds along two directions that often intersect — woman as creator, whose work and hand can be observed directly in the manuscript or the autograph, and woman as subject, captured by the gaze of others, in text as in image.

The bibliophilic interest here lies in the particular rarity of these paths, often less documented than those of their male contemporaries: a letter, an inscription, a provenance can shed light on a life that literary history has sometimes left in shadow.