Hortense Mancini was Duchess of Mazarin and the author of a memoir and many letters. Annalisa Nicholson is a British Academy Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is the author of A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London as well as articles on Charles de Saint-Évremond and Madeleine de Scudéry.

• Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction The Other Voice Hortense Mancini’s Story A Life in Letters The Exiled Épistolière The Making of an Intellectual Note on the Text and Translations Letters Early Years and Marriage Exile in Europe Letters “in the Name of Mancini” Final Years Undated Letters Partial and Auctioned Letters Bibliography Index

"A historical figure who has long fascinated audiences, Hortense Mancini has been subject to caricature and sensationalist coverage by her contemporaries and also by subsequent historians and biographers. Nicholson’s serious account of her life and works will help counter these trends and provide reliable material for further study. Assiduously collating this fairly small but fascinating body of writing, scattered as it is across different countries and continents in libraries, private collections, archives, auction catalogs, and in books where the letters were attributed to other authors, Nicholson shows how Mancini's writing can provide a fruitful example of the voice of a woman who moved in intellectual circles but who historians are reluctant to term “intellectual.”"