The concept and legacy of the salon movement deeply unpins several character dynamics in my Alpennia series. Of the central characters, Jeanne de Cherdillac is the only one old enough to have been part of pre-French-revolution society. She was mentored by a prominent Rotenek salonnière and was expected to take up a similar role for herself, except for the intervention of the French occupation and personal tragedy. (But I have a story planned that touches on that part of her life.) This is the culture she hearkens back to when she begins mentoring Anna Monterrez to be an intellectual hostess.
Margerit Sovitre did not partake of salon culture--she had a private education at home, though a stronger one than most girls her age would have received. And her ambitions focused on the more formal realm of the male academy. But the path that leads her to founding her own academy for girls passes through a role that owes much to salon culture, though she expressed it in the form of public lectures rather than private gatherings.
In both France and England, the woman-centered nature of salon culture makes it a very fertile ground for stories that center women and their relationships with each other. The same female networks that populated the salons included many more individual relationships between pairs or groups of women that could be intensely emotional and even romantic. And they had a social context for envisioning the ways that women could support each other in challenging the limitations that men placed on their expectations.
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