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.
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Her anglophilia and her attention to English literature and culture gave her particular importance for British women writers.
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
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
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, 1984–2024, 14 vols. to date.
3: 25
She strongly admired the...
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
