Madame (Sophie) Cottin

Born Marie Sophie Ristaud in 1770, she is usually known as Sophie Cottin or Madame Cottin. She married young, was widowed a few years later, and then turned to writing, publishing her first novels anonymously during the years after the French Revolution.

Her fiction helped shape the taste for sentimental and early Romantic storytelling in France. Books such as Claire d'Albe, Amélie Mansfield, Mathilde, and Elisabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia brought her a wide readership with their mix of strong feeling, moral conflict, and vivid, often faraway settings.

She died in 1807, still quite young, but her work continued to circulate for decades and was translated into other languages. Readers who enjoy intense emotion, noble heroines, and classic historical or sentimental fiction often find her an intriguing voice from the turn of the 19th century.