La Nouvelle HéloïseJean-Jacques Rousseau
About La Nouvelle Héloïse
Rousseau published Julie, or La Nouvelle Héloïse in 1761. The novel is epistolary. It reworks the medieval story of Heloise and Abelard as the correspondence of Julie d'Étange and her tutor Saint-Preux, set among the Swiss Alps.
Saint-Preux and Julie fall in love. Class and duty forbid marriage. After their separation Julie weds the older, rational Wolmar and builds at Clarens a household ordered by virtue, transparency, and rural simplicity. Saint-Preux returns as a friend under Wolmar's watch. The letters debate passion and duty, the education of children, the corruption of Paris, and the possibility of a purified domestic life. Julie's death closes the book without dissolving the tension between love and moral order.
The novel made Rousseau famous across Europe. It stands between the moral seriousness of Richardson's Clarissa and the emotional intensity later called Romantic. Together with and , it feeds Rousseau's larger claim that natural feeling and corrupt society pull in opposite directions, and that virtue, family, and love must be rebuilt if they are to survive.