Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis

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Standard Name: Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de
Birth Name: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest
Married Name: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis
Titled: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis
Used Form: Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis
Used Form: Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Countess of Genlis and Marchioness of Sillery
SFG , French aristocrat, royal mistress, and later a political refugee in England, made her mark as an educational theorist and writer for children (plays, stories, and good advice) during the decade leading up to the French Revolution. She also published adult novels, romances, and an autobiography. In England at least it was her writing for children that was admired and influential.
Painting of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1790. She is seated in a green upholstered chair, her arms folded on her lap, one hand holding a small fan. She wears light green gloves, a blue silk dress with layers of neckerchiefs and a lacy bow at the neck. Her curly, powdered hair is partly covered by a lace bonnet with huge silvery bows.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Cynthia Asquith
LCA 's mother, Mary , Lady Wemyss, was born a Wyndham, a descendent of the writer Félicité, Mme de Genlis , and of her royal lover Philippe Egalité , Duc d'Orléans (who was also father...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Austen
In letters JA did not restrain her pen: no detail about food or dress was too trivial for her to report, no comment on neighbours and acquaintances too scathing for her to permit herself. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Bannerman
The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch and another based on Goethe 's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
She also wrote for school performance two short plays of slily political import, perhaps after reading Genlis 's Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes, 1780. She must have enjoyed dramatic writing, since after seeing...
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Letitia Barbauld
The title echoes Les Veillées du Chateau by Genlis , transposed for middle-class rather than upper-class children.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
324
A framing narrative tells how the parents of a large family solicit fables, dialogues, and so on...
Intertextuality and Influence Amelia Bristow
The Maniac deals with the effects of the Irish Rebellion. The narrator, Albert, has gone mad after returning home to find his house sacked and wife and children murdered. His sister, Emma, also dies and...
Intertextuality and Influence Lady Charlotte Bury
The title-page quotes Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis on gentle sentiments and dangerous passions. In the novel Donneraile, heir to a peerage, is persuaded by his father to marry Sophia Dickens, only child of a rich merchant...
Friends, Associates Lady Eleanor Butler
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis was at Plas Newydd in 1792 with her daughter (or reputed daughter) Pamela; and six years later, in May 1798, Pamela (now Lady Edward Fitzgerald ) was there again, putting a strain...
Fictionalization Lady Eleanor Butler
Among many less formal honours during the ladies' lifetimes, the most extraordinary was LEB 's award of a French, ancien régime, military medal: the Croix St Louis. It is shown in a famous portrait of...
Reception Hester Mulso Chapone
Her brother John wrote of the Praises that resound on all Sides following the publication of this book, though he regretted that reviewers, in praising the moral content, had ignored the literary style.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
231
Recently Sylvia Harcstark Myers
Literary responses Mary Charlton
This novel, although it seems not to have been remembered in the course of MC 's later career, received three lengthy reviews in serious periodicals. William Enfield in the Monthly, quoted above, said he...
Textual Features Mary Charlton
These anecdotes are indeed genuine insofar as they feature a number of actual characters, notably Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis , Philippe duc d'Orléans , and their daughter or reputed daughter Pamela . These characters reflect, in...
Friends, Associates Emily Eden
EE 's friends included George Villiers (Lord Clarendon) and his sister Lady Theresa Villiers (later Lewis), and Pamela Fitzgerald (later Lady Campbell) .
Lady Campbell was the daughter of romantically-associated parents: Lord Edward Fitzgerald ...
Textual Production Maria Edgeworth
ME worked on a translation of Adèle et Théodore: ou lettres sur l'education by Madame de Genlis .
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
91, 147-9
Butler, Marilyn. “Edgeworth’s Stern Father: Escaping Thomas Day, 1795-1801”. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, Clarendon, pp. 75-93.
76
Friends, Associates Maria Edgeworth
While she was in Paris ME met the now elderly and impoverished Mme de Genlis , whose Adèle et Théodore she had translated in her early teens.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
197

Timeline

1756: Jeanne Le Prince de Beaumont published Le...

Writing climate item

1756

Jeanne Le Prince de Beaumont published Le Magasin des enfants, a collection containing the first influential and literary formulation of the popular fairy storyBeauty and the Beast.

1774: Louise d'Epinay, former friend and patron...

Writing climate item

1774

Louise d'Epinay , former friend and patron of Rousseau , published Conversations d'Emilie, a book on education for girls designed to counter the message of his Emile.

4 June 1798: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a leader of the United...

National or international item

4 June 1798

Lord Edward Fitzgerald , a leader of the United Irishmen and implicated in the ongoing Irish Rebellion, died in Newgate Prison, Dublin, of the effects of a wound sustained while resisting arrest.

1799: French novelist Sophie de Cottin published...

Writing climate item

1799

French novelist Sophie de Cottin published the first of her five highly popular novels, Claire d'Albe.

Texts

Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Adèle et Théodore. M. Lambert et F.J. Baudouin, 1782.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Drames sacrés à l’usage des jeunes personnes. Libraires associées, 1775.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les chevaliers du cygne. Lemierre, 1795.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les petits émigrés. Onfroy; Fr. De Lagarde, 1798.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les veillées du château. M. Lambert, 1784.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les voeux téméraires. Belin, 1798.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Mémoires inédits de madame la comtesse de Genlis. Ladvocat, 1825.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. The Child of Nature. Translator Inchbald, Elizabeth, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. The Theatre of Education. Translators Starke, Mariana and Millecent Thomas, J. Walker, 1787.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes. M. Lambert and F.J. Baudouin, 1780.