Funding Source: National Endowment for the Humanities–Digital Publications Grant – La Princesse de Clèves is an essential work for understanding the history of the novel as a dominant genre, for charting the rise of complex psychological characters in western literature, and for studying female authorship in the early modern period. The digital format of our edition will allow my collaborators and me to present the text to scholars, students, and the general public in a variety of new ways. Our edition will provide the original French text and our English translation, with options to read the book either in a single language or in dual-language mode (with facing-page translation and a bilingual audio recording option), allowing students and teachers to discuss the nuances of seventeenth-century, classical French as well as Madame de Lafayette’s particular style of writing. The digital format will enable us to incorporate dynamic links, embedded within the text, for images, maps, dictionaries, sound and video files that will help readers understand multiple contexts of the work. The edition will include dossiers devoted to different topics of discussion, such as a network analysis of the novel, a history of feminist readings of Lafayette’s texts, and an analysis of the polemic around French president Sarkozy’s critique of the novel. Finally, the digital affordances will allow my team to provide a twenty-first century version of La Princesse de Clèves, which we hope will appeal to a wide audience, thereby opening the novel and French culture to new readers. I am strongly invested in promoting seemingly distant eras and their works to today’s students in an effort to move away from a culture of presentism that too often depicts the past as having little cultural relevance to us today.