Singing through the Pain: Murat Riffing on Montaigne.

This article examines Henriette-Julie de Murat’s creation of an authorial identity during her exile and imprisonment in early eighteenth-century France, focusing on her correspondence with her cousin Menou. Through her extensive Journal, Murat reimagines female friendship by adapting Michel de Montaigne’s concept of male homosocial bonds, infusing it with pastoral love songs that subtly express sapphic desire and erotic agency despite coercive surveillance. The Journal blends prose, poetry, and song to transform Murat’s physical suffering and emotional isolation into a literary space that simultaneously offers distraction, political protest, and a critique of patriarchal control over female intimacy. By doing so, Murat asserts a form of female friendship that challenges heteronormative and hierarchical social structures, positioning her writing as both a personal solace and a political statement.