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The novelist Isabelle de Charrière displayed clear-sightedness towards social norms and what sociologists designate as gender construction. Her disillusioned commentary on the indignation caused by Godwin’s Caleb Williams in 1798 testifies to this. In making visible the symbolic violence exercised on women her novels and plays, as early as 1784, implicitly contest structures of domination. Endowing her heroines with new trajectories and “agency”, they re-establish de facto equality and postulate a genuine sense of universality at a time when the sentimental novel sets up gendered models. After shaking off the prescriptions of her own milieu and in her own life, she shows herself to be critical when the equality of citizenship leaves women out.