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
Textual Features Mary Wollstonecraft
These stories (told by the governess Mrs Mason to her pupils with the explicit aim of improving their characters) reflect the specific influence of Tales of the Castle by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis . Mrs Mason...
Textual Features Mary Wollstonecraft
Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible),
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
501
this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as...
Publishing Mary Wollstonecraft
It was dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand , a supporter of the Revolution and the reputed lover of Germaine de Staël . She produced a second, revised edition by the end of the year...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Wollstonecraft
MW was replying to a number of authoritative male texts about the nature of women: by Burke (who in Reflections on the Revolution in France had glorified Marie-Antoinette and dismissed non-queenly femininity as animal), Rousseau
Friends, Associates Helen Maria Williams
In Paris HMW frequented Mme Roland 's salon, and she and Stone became close friends of Roland and her husband . Those who visited HMW early in her time in Paris included Mary Wollstonecraft (who...
Textual Features Katharine Tynan
Lord Edward was a nephew of KT 's earlier fictional subject, Lady Sarah Lennox . A highly romantic, aristocratic revolutionary, he died of his wounds in prison on 4 June 1798, after the Rebellion of...
Author summary Sarah Trimmer
ST 's writing arose out of her work for two causes, religion and education, brought most closely together in her interest in Sunday schools. She edited magazines and was a pioneer both in animal stories...
Textual Features Sarah Trimmer
This use of instruction cards was innovative, at least in England. ST may or may not have known of the cards issued by Sarah Scott and Lady Barbara Montagu in April 1759 (which failed as...
Textual Features Sarah Trimmer
In addition to Catharine Cappe 's work on Sunday schools and versions of fairy stories by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy , the magazine reviewed work by a whole library of didactic, pedagogical, or improving writers, reprinted as...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Melesina Trench
About the first twenty pages are occupied by MT 's early reminiscences, probably written not long after her first husband's death: she frankly recorded her emotional disturbance over that event.
Trench, Melesina. The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench. Editor Trench, Richard Chenevix, Parker and Bourn.
18
Later pages mix letters...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins
Her protagonist, Theresa Morven, has until three years before the story opens been buried in a French convent at the behest of her stepmother, whom, however, she steadfastly refuses to hate. (Her own mother died...
Friends, Associates Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
On her first visit to Paris, she met Germaine de Staël , and formed lasting friendships with the marquise de Villette (Voltaire 's adopted daughter) and with Elizabeth Patterson (an American heiress, the abandoned...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Morgan describes chiefly Paris and its society, ostensibly on the model of Germaine de Staël 's L'Allemagne. She does indeed include French culture centrally among her topics: she criticises the works of Corneille and...
Education Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
Their father sent them there so that, following his wife's death and his bankruptcy, he could join a travelling company. At this Huguenot, French-speaking school they met the daughters of politician Henry Grattan and those...
Textual Production Mariana Starke
A version of children's plays by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis , The Theatre of Education. A New Translation from the French, appears to be the anonymous work of MS and the little-known Millecent Thomas (formerly Parkhurst).
Dow, Gillian. “The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 3, pp. 367-81.
369
Pitcher, Edward W. “Mariana Starke and Millecent Thomas: Early Translators of Genlis’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Le théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (1779-1780)</span&gt”;. Notes and Queries, Vol.
45 (243)
, No. 1, pp. 81-2.
81-2

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.