Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism," Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s "Great Century."

Faith E. Beasley is a professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College

"This rich and timely work combines close analysis of texts, images, and objects with historical contextualization and broad methodological reflections."

Susan Mokhberi, Rutgers University at Camden:

"This book skillfully raises tensions between the nature of absolutism and foreign influence."

Claire Goldstein, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis:

"The ease and pleasure with which Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal reads belies the hard-hitting contributions it makes to French literary and cultural studies. When Beasley sets out to understand the engagement of two of the 　seventeenth-century’s most eminent women writers with India - what India might have meant to Sévigné and Lafayette, and more broadly to France in these pivotal years of cultural consolidation – she creates a new and experimental methodology that imaginatively reconstructs the "conversation" out of which Bernier’s writings about Mughal India, and the salon-produced literature of Lafayette, Sévigné, La Fontaine, and Fontenelle, emerged."

Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Swarthmore College :

"I firmly believe that Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal will represent one of the most interesting contributions to French studies in the decade. Beasley’s image of India fosters a better understanding of diversity in France in its rich traditions - literary, cultural, gender-related, and political - because this image was mediated through the social milieu of the women’s salon in seventeenth-century France, notably the gathering of Madame de La Sablière."

Elizabeth Goldsmith, Department of Romance Studies, Boston University:

"Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal　is a major contribution to our understanding of the work of Bernier, his place in the early modern history of travel, and his contribution to the genre of the travel narrative. Beasley paves the way for further study of how the accounts of Bernier and other travellers influenced French imaginative literature, especially the novel."