Germaine de Staël

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Standard Name: Staël, Germaine de
Birth Name: Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker
Married Name: Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël
Used Form: Germaine de Stael
GS is remembered primarily for her political activism and the salons she established following the French Revolution; history, politics, and culture were certainly among her frequent literary subjects. The same interests inform her highly successful and influential novels, some short stories and, less significantly, plays. Other writings include literary criticism and personal letters.
Winegarten, Renee. Mme de Staël. Berg, 1985.
81
Her anglophilia and her attention to English literature and culture gave her particular importance for British women writers.
Photograph of the painting of Germaine de Staël by Baron Gérard. Godefroid, 1810. She stands leaning against a stone table. She is wearing a red high-waisted dress with short puff sleeves and a small cameo brooch pinned in the centre of the bust, a black shawl folded over her arm, and a striking red and white turban on her curly hair. She holds a small sprig of green in one hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Georgiana Chatterton
GC was born at the home of a maternal aunt, Margaret Pitt , wife of William Morton Pitt. A beautiful woman, Georgiana's aunt moved among the leading figures of her day. She spent time at...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Her close friendship with Germaine de Staël (carried on largely by letter) is a marker of her European orientation.
Friends, Associates Joanna Baillie
On 11 May 1812 Henry Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary meeting JB and other women writers on a visit to Miss Benjers (Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger ). In his account of this pleasant evening...
Friends, Associates Ellis Cornelia Knight
ECK continued through the later part of her life to cultivate relationships with royalty and the aristocracy, of her own nation and others. Her friendships with Lord St Vincent and with Lady Aylesbury (or Ailesbury)
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already...
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...
Friends, Associates Harriet Beecher Stowe
While visiting Paris, HBS frequented the salon of Germaine de Staël , and in Rome she met Elizabeth Gaskell . In a letter to Grace Schwabe , Gaskell remarked that Stowe was short and...
Friends, Associates Mary Matilda Betham
As well as meeting at Llangollen with Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (who later talked with high praise of her),
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons, 1905.
69, 70
MMB acquired a wide acquaintance in London. She became a close friend...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Hervey
All this provides background for a story about EH 's behaviour later the same year. John Polidori related that on Byron 's first visit to Mme de Staël 's chateau at Coppet in Switzerland...
Friends, Associates Lady Caroline Lamb
LCL 's friendships with women writers (besides Morgan) would surprise anyone not taking her seriously as a writer. When Germaine de Staël visited England, Lady Caroline was delighted to find her wearing a hat with...
Friends, Associates Anna Jane Vardill
Robinson recorded that Vardill visited the novelist Germaine de Staël during the latter's second period of exile in London during 1813-14, and offered to become her amanuensis: an offer which was declined.
Snell, Susan. “Enlightenment Females and Freemasonry”. Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, No. 1-2.
Friends, Associates Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Another uncomfortable experience grew out of Ella Wheeler's early literary success when she was taken up by a woman she calls Mrs Salon, who, since there flourished at the time a Milwaukee School of Poetry...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Inchbald
EI first met both Maria Edgeworth (with whom her friendship had begun two years earlier, when Edgeworth wrote to her in praise of A Simple Story) and Germaine de Staël .
Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London. University Press of America, 1987.
159-61
Friends, Associates Amelia Opie
She had already begun to move in fashionable circles, and became friendly with Lady Caroline Lamb , Lady Cork , and painters James Northcote and Sir Joshua Reynolds .
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. i - xxix.
xxxvii
In 1802, in London and...
Friends, Associates Catherine Fanshawe
When CF met both Byron and Germaine de Staël in spring 1814 at a dinner party at the house of Sir Humphry Davy , she was unimpressed by Byron and his outpourings of radical opinion...

Timeline

1804
The publisher George, George, and John Robinson , whose list of women writers had been distinguished, went bankrupt.
1864
Famous Girls who have become Illustrious Women: Forming Models for Imitation by the Young Women of England, a very popular book of biographical sketches by John M. Darton , was published.
By Christmas 1869
Francis Galton , mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,