Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Edgeworth
The appearance of a rival translation (by some Ladies, unidentified, who had turned their polite accomplishments into earning skills as a result of falling into comparative poverty from ease and opulence) pre-empted publication...
Lady Campbell was the daughter of romantically-associated parents: Lord Edward Fitzgerald
...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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
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
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...
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...
