First published in 1761, Rousseau's Eloisa—known in French as Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse—tells, through a sequence of letters, the story of Julie d'Étange and her tutor Saint-Preux: a love thwarted by rank and duty, a marriage of principle, and a life of feeling disciplined into virtue. Part novel, part meditation, it unfolds across the salons, lakesides, and mountain villages of Switzerland and France, moving from forbidden passion to the ordered happiness of the household at Clarens. In its own day it became a sensation—readers wept over it, wrote to its author, and imitated its heroine—and its influence runs straight through Goethe, Romanticism, and the modern novel of the heart. This edition presents the COMPLETE, UNABRIDGED original text, newly introduced and accompanied by reader's notes that illuminate its historical context, its characters, and its ideas. Part of The Founding Texts Library.