This is an extraordinary work about class & gender, written in the wake of the French Revolution by the brilliant Dutch aristocrat who has only recently garnered much attention. In the first part of the novel in a sort of conte told by "the Abbe de la Tour" we read the story of how a French aristocrat, having fled to a village in Germany, learns a different way of looking at life & reality from her maid, Josephine, & ends up abandoning her Kantian ethics for a more humane (& practical) ethics. The second part of the novel, which is an intellectual, epistolary discussion, has two other characters in the novel conducting social experiments (for instance, persuading peasant parents to switch the names & clothing of a mixed-sex pair of twins at birth, so that they'll be raised until puberty in the opposite gender; & inadvertently mixing up a pair of babies born within an hour of one another, one from a peasant the other from an aristocrat, thus upsetting the aristocrat, who unable to tell which is her "blue-blooded" progeny, refuses to have anything to do with either of them). The style's easy & plain & engaging. The characters are all very human. But nevertheless the book has a Utopian dimension in much the same way as the film "Antonia's Line" does. ( )