Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Germaine de Staël
-
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.
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
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
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
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
Mary Berry
As was standard for such tours they established contact to varying degrees with eminent people: they were presented to the Pope
at Rome and to Queen Maria Carolina
at Naples. (In the same manner, on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
The volume provides lavish notes to explain its sometimes quite obscure historical figures and settings, and cites a wide range of authors including Plutarch
, Shakespeare
, Milton
, and Germaine de Staël
. FH
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
This novel, written in the first person throughout, purports to be the work of Alice Rivers herself, and could easily be read as fictionalised autobiography, though facts outside its story make it clear that Alice...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
The volume takes its epigraphs and historical starting-points from a wide range of sources, including major male Romantics—Wordsworth
, Byron
, Coleridge
, Goethe
, Schiller
—and lesser-known contemporaries including women—Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
She goes on to quote Johnson
, Cowper
, Emerson
(with whose thought she engages in some detail), and many other canonical names. Among women she quotes from Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
(a passage about communion...
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, 1972.
318-19
Leonora is ME
's next ideal domestic woman after...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
MAS
adds a new aesthetic category, the contemplative sublime, alongside the Burke
an or terrible sublime and other categories related to the Burkean beautiful. She derives her thinking from women as well as men. In...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
It again includes many historical, literary, and imaginative portraits of women, including Woman on the Field of Battle. But its enquiry into the affections extends to domestic ties in men too. The Indian with...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Sappho
's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham
may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
By 1832 she had read Mme de Staël
's novel of the romantic female artist, Corinne, three times and claimed the immortal book ought to be reread annually.
Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Editors Kelley, Philip et al., Wedgestone Press, 1984–2025, 14 vols. to date.
