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This article examines the influence of the Enlightenment philosophy on Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin; or the Rights of Women, the author's first major work, published in 1797. After endeavoring to place this fictional dialogue in the context of the political debates of its time, the article presents and analyzes the contents of a little known and quite puzzling work, often wrongly considered as the straightforward expression of the author's thesis on the thorny question of the rights of women. More broadly, it aims at emphasizing the specificity of a text whose author, while still exhibiting some typically « enlightened » characteristics, already foreshadows the « dark » aspects of Romanticism.