Marie Sophie Ristaud (sometimes spelt Risteau) was born in March 1770 at
Tonneins. She was not yet twenty when she married her first husband, Jean-Paul-Marie Cottin, a banker. She wrote several
romantic and historical novels including
Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia (
Elisabeth ou les Exilés de Sibérie 1806), a "wildly romantic but irreproachably moral tale", according to Nuttall's Encyclopaedia. She also published ''Claire d'Albe
(1799), Malvina
(1801), Amélie de Mansfield
(1803), Mathilde
(1805), set in the crusades, and a prose-poem, La Prise de Jéricho''. Her writing became more important to her after her first husband died when she was in her early twenties. She went to live with a cousin and her three children at Champlan (
Seine-et-Oise) but died at the age of 37 in
Paris on 25 August 1807. == List of works ==