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.
"Germaine de Staël" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madame_de_Sta%C3%ABl.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press, 1992.
209
Friends, Associates
Anne Marsh
Before her marriage Anne Caldwell (later AM
) seems to have lived in close ties of friendship with the women of the Wedgwood and Darwin families, including Sarah
, wife of Josiah Wedgwood
. She...
Friends, Associates
Joanna Baillie
Through her friendship with Mary Berry
, JB
met Germaine de Staël
.
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Archon Books, 1970.
45
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
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
Julia Kristeva
This is very largely a book about psychoanalytical issues: its first section, The Clinic, consists largely of case histories, whose interpretation is Lacan
ian. Here JK
defends the full-scale practice of psychoanalysis as opposed...
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
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
Elizabeth Strutt
The title marks it as a refutation of Germaine de Staël
's Delphine. But this was not its only influence. ES
claims to have founded her story on A Residence in France by a...
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...
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, Ronald Hudson, and Scott Lewis, Wedgestone Press, 1984.
3: 25
She strongly admired the...
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
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...