This project explores the notion of reason and the various ways that French women novelists of the eighteenth century negotiated this term. Although the salon system with its female governors flourished in eighteenth-century France, women were rarely granted the same capacities for reason as men. Many contemporary thinkers on the subject, including the philosophes who frequented the salons, often held that women were overly emotional, irrational, and not strong enough in either mind or body for higher intellectual thinking. Women's reason then often became assimilated to the characteristics of virtue and domesticity.

Through their novels, authors such as Isabelle de Charrière, Françoise de Graffigny, and Jeanne Le Prince de Beaumont question the concept of reason and its meaning for women. They join the debate on women's reason, renegotiating and enlarging the terms of reason, virtue, domesticity, and sentiment. Isabelle de Charrière focuses on the question of marriage and of the mariage de raison in her novel, Lettres de Mistriss Henley , to show how a marriage contracted through reason to a reasonable man is not a guarantee of domestic bliss.

Françoise de Graffigny's novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne presents a critique of the Enlightenment's tendencies to erase otherness and assimilate it into its own model. Her unconventional heroine eschews marriage and integration into French patriarchal culture for a life of independent, intellectual study. In so doing, she embodies an alternative epistemology, another way of knowing and understanding, one which is based on her specificities as a Peruvian woman. Jeanne Le Prince de Beaumont's novels also feature heroines who resist assimilation into patriarchal order and reason. They gain moral and intellectual independence through a rigorous code of virtue. Their road to a fully intellectual, individual freedom is through self-sacrifice, giving up love in order to gain intellectual autonomy.

The genre of the sentimental novel allows these novelists to carve out a space of independent reason for women. Through the space of the novel, these women authors become the true femmes raisonnables, performing their own acts of reason.