Castalia House Publishes the First English Translation of a Beloved French Novel That Fourteen Editions Couldn’t Reach Across the Channel
Castalia House released The Little Duchess this week, the first English translation in the 150-year history of La Petite Duchesse, one of the most popular novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, a Breton author whose eighty-three novels shaped a generation of young French readers in the late nineteenth century. The translation is by Summer Charrette, and the ebook has already been delivered to Castalia Library subscribers. It is now available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook.
The book itself is worth knowing. Published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse is the story of Alberte de la Rochefaucon, a twelve-year-old girl pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, and plunged into the drawing rooms and dinner parties of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored — bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to educate her. Her companions call her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. When a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to learn what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself. Readers who love Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Charlotte Yonge will recognize the territory immediately.
La Petite Duchesse ran through fourteen French editions. Despite that, it has never existed in English until now.
Castalia’s Vox Day noted the anomaly when preparing the publication and traced it to what he considers a deliberate pattern: “I was wondering how such a bestselling author’s works could have vanished into history, untranslated, when La Petite Duchesse alone had 14 editions. Then I read her biography, and like Perez Galdos, Fleuriot was not only a devout Christian, but a Catholic and a Royalist. So I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here with regards to socialist academics on both sides of the linguistic divide having attempted to bury a significant percentage of some of the best and most popular works of the Christian nations.”
Fleuriot’s biography supports the observation. Born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany on October 28, 1829, she came from a family of devout Catholics and Royalists loyal to the Bourbons. Her father was raised by an uncle who was a priest shot by revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy — the Revolutionary-era legislation that attempted to subordinate the French Church to the new secular state. Her background gave her fiction a deep grounding in traditional Catholic and family values, which made her work immensely popular with the French Catholic middle class. She wrote eighty-three novels across her career, all aimed at young women. She died in December 1890.
Fourteen editions of La Petite Duchesse alone. Eighty-three novels total. Complete obscurity in the English-speaking world until this week.
The Galdós comparison Vox Day draws is instructive for a different reason. Benito Pérez Galdós is widely considered the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes — five Nobel Prize nominations, 46 historical novels in the Episodios Nacionales series that constitutes one of the supreme achievements of European realism, a body of work comparable in scope and ambition to Balzac or Dickens. Only eight of those forty-six historical novels have ever been translated into English. Castalia has been working through the series, publishing its own translation of Trafalgar — the first volume — alongside further volumes in an ongoing project to give English readers access to what Castalia describes as “one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written.” The irony Vox Day’s Galdós comparison creates is worth noting: Galdós was himself a secular republican and anti-clerical figure, the opposite of Fleuriot politically and religiously, and he was also left largely untranslated. The neglect of non-English literature runs broader than any single ideological pattern — but Fleuriot’s specific case, eighty-three novels and fourteen editions of a single title with zero English translations across 150 years, suggests something more targeted than mere academic indifference.
Castalia’s translation program has become one of the more remarkable publishing projects in the English-language literary world. The weekly translation commitment announced earlier this year has already delivered Sanshiro — Natsume Soseki’s 1908 novel of a young man navigating modern Tokyo, considered one of the classics of the Meiji period — alongside the complete six-volume first English translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, the 1926-27 serial by Yoshikawa Eiji that established the modern Japanese adventure novel and made Yoshikawa the most widely read author in Japanese history. FP covered the Naruto Scrolls completion and the announcement of the next project, the Hanshichi Casebook — Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, 69 stories set in Edo, only 14 previously translated, with Castalia publishing all of them across seven volumes.
The pattern across all three projects — French, Spanish, Japanese — is that Castalia is doing work that academic presses and mainstream publishers have declined to do. Pérez Galdós has been sitting in Spanish classrooms and bookshops for 150 years. Fleuriot sold fourteen editions of a single novel. Yoshikawa Eiji was the most widely read author in Japanese history. None of them existed in complete English translation. Castalia is not discovering obscure provincial writers. It is translating authors whose home cultures have recognized them as major figures, whose neglect in English is a specific product of who decided which foreign literature deserved translation budgets and prestige.
The weekly ebook subscription is available at stack.castalialibrary.com. The Little Duchess is now on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
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