Julia V. Douthwaite describes the interrelated representations of cultural and sexual difference in key French works of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The heroines of this book are foreign women, brought to France through no will of their own, and forced into the margins of a new society.

The author contends that their experience resonates with larger cultural beliefs about exotic and primitive peoples in ancien regime France and illuminates some of the blind spots in Enlightenment thought.