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.
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
Literary responses Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier felt that this novel, together with LMC 's lives of Manon Roland and Germaine de Staël (first volume in The Ladies' Family Library) showed that polemical writing had not harmed her...
Textual Production Lydia Maria Child
In 1832 appeared The Biographies of Madame de Staël and Madame Roland and The Biographies of Lady Russell and Madame Guyon. The following year came Good Wives—which in later editions sometimes appeared as...
Intertextuality and Influence Kate Chopin
KC 's earliest surviving works are a commonplace book, and a fable, Emancipation, which she wrote while still at school. The commonplace book contains some early writing on the subject of the independent woman...
Intertextuality and Influence Blanche Warre Cornish
The title-page quotes Shakespeare and Germaine de Staël . The novel introduces its protagonist, William Milton, with generalisations about different types of people, especially those who refuse, out of pride or laziness, to compete for...
Textual Features Helen Craik
Authors quoted on HC 's title-page include La Rochefoucauld . Mary Robinson 's Walsingham is quoted in volume two and supplies the epigraph for volume three.
Craciun, Adriana, and Kari E. Lokke, editors. “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800”. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, State University of New York Press, pp. 193-32.
228n47
The story opens shortly before the French Revolution...
Intertextuality and Influence Maria Edgeworth
She designed it to combat the influence of romantic fiction, and to answer Germaine de Staël 's Delphine and Goethe 's Sorrows of Werther.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon.
318-19
Leonora is ME 's next ideal domestic woman after...
Intertextuality and Influence George Eliot
The narrator of The Mill on the Floss is not unproblematically masculine, but writes from time to time as a woman. The novel begins with an unusually intense and nuanced study of childhood. Maggie Tulliver...
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.
Textual Production Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Her subjects include such remarkable women as Bess of Hardwick and her own friend Germaine de Staël .
Publishing Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Elizabeth Devonshire was a prolific and expressive letter-writer. Letters of the two duchesses, Elizabeth and Georgiana, were edited in 1898 by Vere Foster . In 1980 Elizabeth's unpublished correspondence in French with de Staël ...
Intertextuality and Influence Emily Faithfull
The novel brings together the fashionable upper-class society which EF had experienced in her youth, with the question of women's employment which was the burning issue of her working life. She acknowledges the work of...
Textual Production Catherine Fanshawe
The letter that CF wrote about her first meeting with Germaine de Staël (also, apparently, her first meeting with Byron ) concentrates firmly on de Staël: Eloquence is a great word, but not too big...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catherine Fanshawe
One of the poems, a delightful Ode which imitates or parodies several well-known passages in various works by Gray , was written not by CF but by her friend Mary Berry , some time before...
Textual Features Mrs E. M. Foster
The novel parodies Germaine de Staël 's Corinne (which had appeared in French in 1807, in English in 1808). Chapters are supplied with epigraphs: some standard choices like Pope and Cowper , but also texts...

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