GENLIS, Stéphanie Félicité Brulart, comtesse de. ~ Les Petits Émigrés, ou Correspondance de quelques enfans. Ouvrage fait pour servir à l’éducation de la jeunesse. Paris: Onfroy and Fr. de Lagarde in Berlin, 1798.
2 vols, 8vo (149 × 90 mm), pp. [i-ii], [2, the second numbered in error ‘iv’], [iii]-viii, 404; [2], 430, complete, despite misnumbering and misbinding of 1 leaf ‘Epitre dédicatoire à mes petits-enfans’ after first title. Rather spotted. Early nineteenth-century quarter calf, gilt. Spines faded, but a good copy.
First edition. An educational epistolary novel about the life of young emigrés during the French Revolution — written the with first-hand experience of exile: Madame Genlis having lived a peripatetic life outside France since 1791. Dedicated to her grandchildren and aimed both at children and older readers, the novel opens with epigrams from Irish-born actor-playwright Arthur Murphy (‘There are three things highly pernicious to the endearments of beauty...... gaming, scandal and politics’.) and Voltaire (‘C’est être un monstre, que de ne pas aimer ceux qui ont cultivé notre ame’). A ‘Hambourg’ edition appeared in the same year, and the book was published in English as The Young Exiles, or, Correspondence of some juvenile Emigrants the following year. Cioranescu, 30621; Martin, Mylne & Frautschi, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-1800, 98.44. Worldcat: University of Southern Mississippi