Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
-
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.
Her subjects in the first essay are Hannah More
(especially her Practical Piety and An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul) and Anna Letitia Barbauld
, whom she regarded as...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Meeke
Her husband no longer had any duty to support her. At this time he was in Paris, making a living as an English teacher among the offspring of the French nobility, under the patronage...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Moody
There is an unexplained gap in her reviewing between August 1791 and January 1800. Four of her reviews were co-authored: with Ralph Griffiths
, his son George
, or her husband
.
Waters, Mary A. British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832. Palgrave Macmillan.
141 and n32, 143
Intertextuality and Influence
Hannah More
HM
sent a copy to Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
, from whose bible plays, as she acknowledged in the accompanying letter, she had taken her generic idea.
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.
375
Her volume (full title Sacred Dramas: chiefly intended...
At about the same date she published several Recollections of an Authoress in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal. Each of these dealt with a particular author she had known, including Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
and Sir Walter Scott
.
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, p. xxxvii - lxx.
lv
Textual Features
Eliza Parsons
The story is set in Germany (which at this date was seen in England as the land of romance)
Hoeveler, Diane Long, and Eliza Parsons. “Introduction”. The Castle of Wolfenbach, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Diane Long Hoeveler, Valancourt Books, p. vii - xvii.
x
and the heroine, Matilda Weimar, appears to be German, though she turns out to...
Textual Production
Eliza Parsons
It shared the bill (which was given for the benefit of actress Isabella Mattocks
) with Elizabeth Inchbald
's The Child of Nature (adapted from Genlis
) and The Soldier's Festival; or, The Night before...
Intertextuality and Influence
Clara Reeve
In this ground-breaking study CR
provides the first full critical and historical account of the modern novel form (the one most used by women writers), and defends the genre of romance against its many attackers...
Occupation
Frances Arabella Rowden
Girls at the school were taken on alternate Sundays to the chapel at the British embassy and to the French Protestant L'Eglise de l'Oratoire. Afterwards they were required to write down from memory the...
Textual Production
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
Its fuller title is Asaph; or The Herrnhutters; being a rhythmical sketch of the principle events, and most remarkable institutions in the modern history of the Church of the Unitas Fratrum, commonly called Moravians;...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
The pamphlet (of which other, later translations also exist) had in MAS
's version notes by Lewis Way
, an Evangelical Anglican who had travelled in Russia and met the Tsar. It concentrates on Alexander's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS
began making up stories in her sixth year, but wrote later, what they were I have not the least idea. I was too young to write them down; but when I had thought of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Martha Sherwood
She began it in connection with the writing game shared with her sister: the exchange of letters in the voice of French characters, modelled on those of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
in Adelaide and Theodore; or...
