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.
The book's first and longest piece, The History of an Enthusiast, is strongly influenced by Germaine de Staël
's novel Corinne; ou, L'Italie.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Hidden Rill: The Life and Career of Maria Jane Jewsbury, II”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
67
, No. 1, The Library, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 1984, pp. 450-73.
451
Protagonist Julia Osborne is an orphan being brought up...
Intertextuality and Influence
Kate Chopin
KC
's earliest surviving works are a commonplace book, and a fable, Emancipation, which she wrote while still at school. The commonplace book contains some early writing on the subject of the independent woman...
Intertextuality and Influence
Blanche Warre Cornish
The title-page quotes Shakespeare
and Germaine de Staël
. The novel introduces its protagonist, William Milton, with generalisations about different types of people, especially those who refuse, out of pride or laziness, to compete for...
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
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
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...