FSLG Annual Review - Senate House Libraries - University of London

Compilation of the Bibliography
Mylne is best remembered for two works: The eighteenth-century French novel:
techniques of illusion (1965) and for the work on which she collaborated with Angus
Martin and Richard Frautschi Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-
1800 (1977). It would seem that the compilation of the latter went hand-in-hand
with the building up of the collection now known as the Mylne Collection. The
Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-1800 follows on from an earlier
bibliography by Silas P. Jones which covers the first half of the eighteenth century,
entitled A list of French prose fiction from 1700 to 1750: with a brief introduction by
S. Paul Jones (1939). Jones’s bibliography was however only to bear fruit in terms of
critical output several decades later in the 1960s and 1970s. Creative stagnation was
thought to have set in with the French novel in the second half of the eighteenth
century. Vivienne Mylne was not convinced by this view. She was sure that the
originality and special character of the French novel during this period of sensibility,
combined with its interest in moral questions, would be revealed if the totality of
this literature was better known. This provided a motivation for the compilation of
the bibliography.
The definition of ‘genre romanesque’ is wider than that of a mere novel. Contes for
instance, or indeed anything with a narrative element (unless in verse) were
included. As the 18 th century advanced, translations grew in number and so they too
were included in this bibliography of the second half of the 18 th century. Unlike
Jones, the trio attempted to enumerate all editions of a particular work and unlike
Jones they also included brief information about the content of each work. The main
libraries used were the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale and the
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, although they also made use of the volumes of the
National Union Catalog which started to issue its printed volumes after they had
commenced work. As these volumes began to appear in 1968 and their project was
well under way by this time we can infer that the three of them began work on the
bibliography in the mid-sixties which would have been just after Vivienne Mylne
completed her book on the eighteenth-century French novel. They also made use of
what Vivienne Mylne terms ‘auxiliary libraries’ including those of Leningrad and
Moscow and the Chateau d’Oron in Switzerland (invaluable for novels in the latter
years of the 18 th century).
The achievement of this bibliography is all the more remarkable when one considers
that the three of them were living on different continents – Angus Martin in
Australia (Macquarie University), Richard Frautschi in the USA (Pennsylvania State
University) and Vivienne Mylne in the UK, before the advent of email and OCLC
FirstSearch and computers in general. One stumbling-block mentioned in the
extensive introduction to the bibliography was that the French revolutionary
calendar does not neatly fit with the Gregorian calendar as its year begins and ends
with the month of Vendémiaire which begins on 22, 23 or 24 September. As one
rarely knows in which month a book is published, they decided to adopt the arbitrary
but necessary expedient of nominating the Gregorian year which had the most
months in common with the revolutionary one – thus Year 1 became 1793, Year 2
1794 and so on.
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