Abstract: The old tale of the abandoned woman became the rule as “the heroine’s text” in feminocentric novels written by men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Riccoboni in the eighteenth century and even Sand in the nineteenth, taking up this old male story constitutes a kind of rite of passage toward literature. Their rewriting of this masculine text of femininity attests to the difficulties a woman experiences in coming to writing, but also to her ambition and her strategies for negotiating a place for herself within the institution of literature.
