| Birth Name: | Françoise-Cécile Messageot |
| Birth Date: | November 22, 1782 |
| Birth Place: | Lons-le-Saunier, Franche-Comté, France |
| Death Date: | April 1, 1851 (aged 68) |
| Death Place: | Quintigny, Jura, France |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Period: | Early 19th-century |
| Genre: | Historical novels |
| Movement: | Sentimentalism |
Fanny Tercy, Françoise-Cécile Messageot; November 22, 1782, Lons-le-Saunier – April 1, 1851, Quintigny), a 19th-century French historical novelist.[1] Along with Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis,, Sophie Doin, and George Sand, Tercy embraced and transformed sentimentalism during the first half of the 19th-century.[2]
Françoise-Cécile (nickname "Fanny") Messageot, was born on 22 November 1782 in Lons-le-Saunier.[3] She was the daughter of Jean Joseph Messageot, a cavalry officer who became a postmaster, and Marie-Françoise Clerc.[4] She had an older sister, Lucile, who became a painter, and a twin brother, François-Xavier. Her mother remarried Claude-Antoine Charve, a judge at the Lons-le-Saunier court. From this second marriage, Louis, Tercy's half-brother, and Liberté-Constitution-Désirée (1790–1856), a half-sister who married Charles Nodier, were born. Tercy spent her childhood in Lons-le-Saunier.
Judge Charve was imprisoned in 1793 at the Cordeliers prison where he met Anne-François Tercy (1775–1841), playwright and "man of letters",[5] also imprisoned; he was Fanny's future husband.[6] They married on September 11, 1814. After the wedding, the couple went to Paris and were very close to Charles Nodier. He encouraged Fanny Tercy to write. Unable to stand her husband any longer, she left him in 1824. To prepare for her La Dame d'Oliferne (1829), Tercy walked from the town of Arinthod to the old Oliferne castle. She regularly attended the salon held by Charles Nodier and met many writers of the time there: "... Fanny de Tercy, in her corner, had already finished her work: she would not stop knitting while Musset, Hugo, Vigny or Nerval were recounting their verses".[7]
During the reign of Louis-Philippe, she obtained a pension of a "woman of letters". From 1839, Fanny Tercy returned to Quintigny where she died on April 1, 1851.[8]