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
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...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Margravine of Anspach
EMA goes into some detail about the French court and royal family from the time that she lived at Versailles, pausing too to do justice to the talents of Madame Genlis, if only in...
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, 2008.
324
A framing narrative tells how the parents of a large family solicit fables, dialogues, and so on...
Education Fredrika Bremer
As FB grew older, she became increasingly interested in novels. At the age of fifteen she was beyond measure happy
Bremer, Fredrika. Life, Letters, and Posthumous Works of Fredrika Bremer. Editor Bremer, Charlotte, Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1868, https://archive.org/details/lifelettersposth00bremuoft/mode/2up.
34
to be allowed the privilege of reading fiction for a half hour every night...
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.
qtd. in
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
231
Recently Sylvia Harcstark Myers

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 story Beauty and the Beast.
Zipes, Jack. “The Origins of the Fairy Tale for Children or, How Script was Used To Tame the Beast in Us”. Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, edited by Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 119-34.
125-6

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.
Goodman, Dena. Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters. Cornell University Press, 2009.
64-5, 151 and n78

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.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.

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.
Finch, Alison. “Review of Sophie Cottins Claire dAlbe and Michael J. Calls study of Cottin”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol.
17
, No. 1, Oct. 2004, pp. 134-7.
135

Texts

Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Adèle et Théodore. M. Lambert et F.J. Baudouin, 1782, 3 vols.
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, 3 vols.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les petits émigrés. Onfroy; Fr. De Lagarde, 1798, 2 vols.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les veillées du château. M. Lambert, 1784, 3 vols.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Les voeux téméraires. Belin, 1798, 3 vols.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Mémoires inédits de madame la comtesse de Genlis. Ladvocat, 1825, 10 vols.
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, 4 vols.
Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de. Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes. M. Lambert and F.J. Baudouin, 1780, 4 vols.