Madame de La Fayette (baptized March 18, 1634 - May 25, 1693) was a French writer, the alleged author of La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and often taken to be one of the earliest European novels of its day.

Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but rich nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education of sorts from Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Menage would lead her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend from 1657.

In 1655, de La Vergne married François Motier, Comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen years her senior, with whom she would have two sons. She accompanied him to country estates in Auvergne and Bourbonnais although she would make frequent trips down back to Paris, where she began to mix with court society and formed her own successful salon. Some of her acquaintances include Henrietta of England, future Duchess of Orleans, Antoine Arnauld and the leading French writers Segrais and Huet. Earlier on, during the civil war called the Fronde, La Fayette had also befriended the Cardinal de Retz. Settling permanently in Paris in 1659, she published, anonymously, La Princesse de Montpensier in 1662.

From 1665 onwards La Fayette formed a close relationship with La Rochefoucauld, author of Maximes, who introduced her to many literary luminaries of the time, including Racine and Boileau. 1670 saw the publication of Zaïde, a Hispano-Moorish romance which was signed by Segrais but is almost certainly attributable to La Fayette. Her close relations with both men lasted throughout the 1670s, when it is likely both helped her with the writing of La Princesse de Clèves, first published anonymously in March 1678. An immense success, the work is often taken to be the first true French novel and a prototype of the early psychological novel.

The death of close friend La Rochefoucauld in 1680 and her husband in 1683 led La Fayette to lead a less active social life late in her life. Three works attributed to her were published posthumously: Memoires de la Cour de France (1731), Histoire de Madame Henriette d'Angleterre (1720) and La Contesse de Tende (1718).