 Questions of gender and sexuality suffuse the entire corpus of Scudéry. Her prolix novels celebrate an egalitarian love between men and women. Despite their exotic settings, they condemn the typical oppressions endured by the era’s women: forced marriage, abduction, and domestic violence. Her fictitious orations emphasize the right of women to exercise political authority. Scudéry’s defense of the right of women to participate in the public sphere of civil society is particularly emphatic in her writings focused on the figure of the poet Sappho. As Newman argues in her edition of these writings (2003), The Story of Sappho, embedded in the novel Artamène or the Great Cyrus, and the Harangue of Sappho, the twentieth of the speeches presented in Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues, clearly indict the social repression of women. The institution of marriage itself serves as an object of censure.