The terms ‘salon’ and ‘circle’ refer to a particular type of literary group that has shaped Russian culture since the seventeenth century, with its influence peaking in the 1820s and 1830s. Unlike literary societies, these communities have rarely had any formal membership, written rules or programmatic documents. Instead, they have tended to favour friendly chats on various subjects, literary recitations, and discussions on certain days of week, sometimes accompanied by musical performances. These practices engender strong personal bonds and shared memories. Some of these communities have created their own ‘circle languages’ with recurrent motifs, inside jokes, and domestic mythologies, which in turn have framed their literary output. The chapter reconstructs their activities by examining that output alongside secret-police reports. Viewed from this perspective, the history of literary circles and salons can be seen as the history of the vanished ‘everyday life’ of their participants.

The late seventeenth century saw the creation of a new affective category, ‘tender passions’ or ‘sentiments’, by female writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry in the salons of Louis XIV’s France. From here into the eighteenth century, sentiments were developed through airs, novels and drama. Contrary to prevalent images of eighteenth-century communicative clarity, sentiments were more socially complex and less easily legible than the ‘passions’ of the Baroque. Their expression on stage required a new realistic dramaturgy, building on the flexible use of ensemble, gesture and mime in comic opera. A characteristically sentimental conception of the dramatic ‘tableau’ resulted. Theorized by Diderot and Rousseau in the 1750s, tableaux aimed to evoke and sustain ‘tender’ sentiments of pity, affection and social solidarity through dramatically heightened moments in the action. These relied on a more spellbinding theatrical illusion, intended to absorb the audience within its all-engrossing atmosphere, and to which music contributed by supporting and highlighting gestures over rhetorical set pieces.

Wagner’s relationship with Paris was a career-long struggle with a highly developed music industry that aligned badly with his aesthetic priorities. On repeat visits for what we would now call career networking, he rented in marginal areas of Paris, tried to get on the publishing and performance ladder, courted imperial favour, conducted concerts of his own works, and finally succeeded, briefly, in getting an opera staged at the Paris Opéra (the ill-fated Tannhäuser in 1861). Thereafter, Wagner cults – always contested – began in the concert hall, where anything from riots to hushed listening greeted programmed excerpts of his works. Cultishness intensified after his death – in the press, in artistic and high-bourgeois salons, and finally at the Opéra. This chapter explores the spaces, networks, and contexts within which Wagner attempted to carve out a Paris career which allowed the full concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk to blossom only posthumously.

This chapter explores Viennese salons, where arrangements were performed in early nineteenth-century Vienna, and the purposes they fulfilled, such as fostering sociability and advancing social and aesthetic understanding. It examines how various types of opera arrangements extended the meaning and experience of public concert-going. They could allow domestic performers and listeners to engage with ideas about political freedom, class, and nationalism that were being raised in the Viennese salons more generally. Audiences for opera in Viennese salons could listen to works with revolutionary themes and potentially politically inflamatory plots that would not be tolerated in other art forms or more public venues. The chapter considers three prominent female ‘arrangers’ who were significant agents in rearranging the social order in early nineteenth-century Vienna: Fanny von Arnstein; Caroline Pichler; and Maria Theresia von Paradis. It discusses the musical and literary activities they organised, and the degree to which class and gender mixing persisted in their more or less private music-making, especially through the vehicle of musical arrangements.

Molière worked within the context of a powerful literary establishment, with complex systems of rewards and punishments. Sources of financial support were essential for an author and generally sought from patronage or from the church; institutional prestige might be conferred by election to the Académie Française. Patronage, always potentially unreliable, became increasingly dominated by the King and court and entailed considerable obligations, while the church could prove a formidable enemy. Such sources of patronage and prestige were complemented by a dynamic literary scene, in which reputations could be made or lost: through the salons, both the relatively more social and the more specifically scholarly; and through the critics, with again some writing for a more popular readership and some drawn from among the learned scholars. For a dramatist, popular success was a crucial factor. Molière encountered repeated difficulties, from the withdrawal of patronage, the hostility of the church, and attacks by critics and jealous rivals. He surmounted these with extraordinary success, through a unique combination of factors: great popular success in Paris, the breadth of his appeal, the support of the King and court, the admiration of powerful critical voices and, not least, the influential approval of distinguished scholarly commentators.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

This chapter challenges the standard narrative associated with the woman writer and the rise of the novel according to which an antisocial woman requires a separate, private space to create works that she delivers to the world anonymously, if she dares to publish them at all. When we return to seventeenth-century France, the period when the novel first came into its own, we discover a history of the genre, its practitioners and its consumers that upends this reductionist and stereotypical history. In France the novel arises out of a culture of collaboration and conversation, where women played a pivotal and determining role. Women influenced the novel form itself in addition to adding their own texts. The chapter presents the argument that collaboration and conversation, which were the hallmarks of a unique salon culture created and dominated by women, were at the heart of the genesis of the novel and influenced and shaped France’s Republic of Letters as whole. An examination of these particular characteristics illuminates the particular form the novel took in France, the influence women exerted on the novel, and why it was their creative genre of choice.