Wouters, Cornélie and Marie

Cornélie Wouters (1737–1802), also known as the Baroness of Vasse, and her sister Marie Wouters (1739–after 1802), both born in Brussels, had active literary careers in Paris in the 1780s and 1790s, separately and collaboratively, composing original works in French and translating a substantial corpus of theatre, history, and fiction from English to French. Notable publications include a twelve-volume history of English theatre, an allegorical fairy-tale version of the American Revolution, a lunar travel narrative, and a political pamphlet addressed to the French National Assembly arguing that the new republic should grant full rights to Jews. In all their works, the sisters take a special interest in relations between France and England, and, in some, they take an even more global view, as in Cornélie Wouters’ Le nouveau continent (1783), whose narrative stretches from the new United States to imperial Russia, and La Belle indienne (1798), the story of a girl from India raised by nobles in Paris during the reign of Louis XVI.