AVOIDING PROVINCIALISMS AND BAD PRONUNCIATION: HOW TO CORRECT FEMALE SPEECH AND WRITING. 8vo. xxxv pp, (1), 321 pp, (1), plus charming engraved frontispiece of a girls’ school classroom. Bound in contemporary mottled calf with gilt title on spine. Joints a little worn, otherwise very good. Rare second edition, seemingly a re-issue of the first (1777) with a cancel title-page. Competing against similar titles by the Abbé Barthélemy and David Choffin, the title makes it clear that the intention of Prunay’s work is to reform women’s language, “to recognize those provincial expressions, to avoid them, and to prevent the habit of vicieuse pronunciation among young girls”. The work is dedicated to Marie The?re?se Louise de Savoie-Carignan de Lamballe (1749-1792), a boon companion of Marie Antoinette who shared her fate at the hands of the Revolutionaries. “In the preface to his book, Prunay both acknowledged the beauty of women’s natural eloquence and stated his support for a reformed spelling based on it… But the chevalier also expressed his dismay at the poor command of grammar and spelling that deformed women’s writing. His goal, after all, was not to praise women’s speech, but to correct their writing… Making a larger social claim, Prunay went on to declare that if only women would learn to write properly, the French language would be ‘enriched beneath their pens’…” (Goodman, pp. 127-8). OCLC shows the 1777 printing at Vassar, Mississippi, Miami (OH), Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The 1785 is held at UC Santa Cruz only. * cf eg. Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (2009); and Barbara Taylor, Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005), pp. 211-223.