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.
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...
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
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, Vol.
4
, No. 1-2, 2013.
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. Reprint of 1923, Archon Books, 1970.
45
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Green
This preface is headed by two Latin words (one with a faulty grammatical ending) from Ovid
's description of chaos. SG
slams both male and female novelists, chiefly authors of gothic or horrid novels and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ann Kelty
The book bears in various details the influence of Jane Austen
, though its overall project of pious didacticism is at odds with Austen's approach. The title-page quotes Rousseau
on the topic of the sensitive...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Meeke
The story follows its hero's unsurprising metamorphosis: he begins as the socially negligible James Treton, an orphan, assistant in an accoucheurs' and surgeon-apothecaries' practice, and ends as Arthur, Duke of Avon. It opens with nicely...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
She particularly admired Joanna Baillie
's Ethwald and the Chronicles of Froissart
. Germaine de Staël
's Corinne was another major influence on her. She wrote years later: That book, in particular towards its close...
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 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
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
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
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...
