In 1662 the French noblewoman Madame de La Fayette, published anonymously what is thought to be France’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Montpensier. Drawing on her knowledge of history and experience of Louis XIV’s court, de La Fayette penned a short, complicated tale of love, adultery, jealousy and betrayal that ends in tears and tragedy, set a century before, at the time of the wars of religion.

The book was an instant success, even if the critics attacked the then unnamed author of mixing fact and fiction in dubious fashion and slandering historical figures along the way. La Princesse de Montpensier is credited with inspiring Stendhal more than a hundred years later and Eugène Fromentin two centuries on. It is also the stuff of modern-day romantic pot-boilers and soap operas.

Later this year de La Fayette’s work will become the first by a woman to be studied in France’s literature baccalauréat (Bac-L). The absence of female authors in the more than 20 years since the updated exam was introduced in 1995 has been blamed on an “excess of testosterone” in France’s curriculum.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Madame de La Fayette (1634-93) painted by an unknown 17th century artist. Photograph: Alamy

The syllabus committee could have chosen any number of distinguished French women writers: Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand, Louise Labé and Colette to name a few. Instead it chose a woman whose name will be largely unknown outside of her homeland, except to students of French literature and fans of French cinema; the book was turned into a romping costume drama by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier in 2010.

Madame de La Fayette was born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne in 1634 to a family of minor nobles who frequented the circle of Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister. Introduced into society by her widowed mother, who was the daughter of Louis XIII’s doctor, the young Marie-Madeleine was not impressed at attempts to match-make. Aged 19, she wrote to her friend, the historian and writer Gilles Ménage: “I’m utterly convinced that love is something inconvenient and I’m overjoyed that my friends and I are exempt from it.”

Two years later she married the Comte de La Fayette, by all accounts a self-effacing man who preferred his family’s country homes to the royal court in Paris. Having produced two sons, the couple spent most of their subsequent time apart. This marital separation would become a leitmotif of de La Fayette’s novels: a woman bored senseless with a dull husband conducts a secret affair with another.

In a France Culture radio documentary, Laurence Plazenet, a writer and expert in 17th-century French literature at the Sorbonne, said de La Fayette’s “obsession with secrecy” led to friends nicknaming her “Brouillard” (Fog).

“In all her books the secret is an absolutely fascinating theme … a treasure, a means of putting pressure on others, a form of authority. It’s also the only private space that exists. There’s this obsession with secrets, but at the same time all her characters are in a tragic quest for the truth,” Plazenet said.

One of de La Fayette’s personal griefs, Plazenet said, was that she was not considered a classic beauty but was regarded as more intelligent than beautiful. Philippe Sellier, a literature professor at Paris IV university, added that Madame de La Fayette, along with the aristocratic writers Madame de Sévigné and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, formed what he called a “feminine avant-garde”. “They refused to be like most other women,” he told France Culture. “They wanted to excel in all of life’s seductive arts; to be accomplished women with, in addition, what Mademoiselle de Scudéry described as a joyful spirit.

“Some of them refused outright the idea of sexuality, which they viewed as something trivial. For them, the most successful relation between men and women was of a tender friendship.”

De La Fayette had a long and close “friendship” with the Duke of Rochefoucauld, the author of Maximes, whom she allegedly saw every day for 15 years, but the exact nature of the bond with him, unsurprisingly, remains “perfectly enigmatic to us”, said Sellier. “They saw each other every day for 15 years … and we still don’t know exactly what was the nature of their relationship.”

While the older John Milton was writing Paradise Lost and John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress, de La Fayette was writing to friends denying having written the works for which she would become known and which would end up on a baccalauréat syllabus more than 350 years later. From September, final year literature students will study the book and Tavernier’s film in conjunction.

France’s Socialist education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, was said to have personally intervened to have de La Fayette included in the study programme after a 2016 petition set up by French professor Françoise Cahen proposing a number of female writers.

Lamenting the “latent sexism” in the current Bac-L, Cahen wrote that the authors she proposed were “not especially interesting just because they are women, but because they are worth studying for the importance they have brought to literature and society”.

Campaigners are now trying to increase the number of women writers included in the teacher training literature degree; since 1981, only 11 books by women have been included out of about 220 works studied.