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.
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...
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
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The authorial voice is forthright about the poet's own desire to be a literary trail-blazer for womankind, and she is already defining that task in terms of rejection of the domestic. She also has a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Chatterton
She headed her chapters with quotations which draw on European as well as English literature: Petrarch
, Byron
, Germaine de Staël
.In its early stages the book may read like a courtship novel (full...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
LEL's poetic persona in her title poem is deeply indebted to Germaine de Staël
's highly influential Corinne (1807), which depicts the contemporary woman artist as a spontaneous performer of verse to her own musical...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte Nooth
CN
refers to several canonical English names (Pope
, Reynolds
, Garrick
, Shakespeare
, and Edmund Kean
in her first poem), and relates closely to continental women. She praises Germaine de Staël
for...
Intertextuality and Influence
L. E. L.
While the heroine, the English orphan heiress Emily, perishes young of unhappy love, there are moments of considerable archness, such as the one when (after she has been abducted and rescued in Italy after the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
This novel retells The Husband of a Blue, a story by ESP
's mother, Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
, from the perspective of Avis Dobell, a wife, mother, and would-be artist who sacrifices her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Jacson
The title-page quotes Pope
and Staël
. The novel's opening sounds like a tale of mysterious origins, but without the mystery. A quotation from Shakespeare
's Tempest—Prospero telling Miranda the story of her past—introduces...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Francesca Lady Wilde
Other titles here include The Voice of the Poor, France in '93, Corinne's Last Love-Song (a response to the tradition initiated by Germaine de Staël
), and A Lament for the Potato.
Wilde, Jane Francesca, Lady. Poems. 2nd ed., Cameron and Ferguson, 1871.
v
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Brownell Jameson
This work, which somewhat uncomfortably mixes romance with travel narrative and cultural guide, was influenced by de Staël
's Corinne. Initially put out by a printer named Thomas at his own expense, it was...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Brownell Jameson
The book is also a model of female erudition, peppered with foreign phrases, references to earlier Shakespeare critics, to the visual arts, and to other authors, including the ancient Greek dramatists and the German romanticists...
