Germaine de Staël

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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.
Photograph of the painting of Germaine de Staël by Baron Gérard. Godefroid, 1810. She stands leaning against a stone table. She is wearing a red high-waisted dress with short puff sleeves and a small cameo brooch pinned in the centre of the bust, a black shawl folded over her arm, and a striking red and white turban on her curly hair. She holds a small sprig of green in one hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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 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...
Leisure and Society Hannah More
Once an omnivorous reader, HM restricted her choice of books in later life, in line with her religious convictions. She delighted in William Cowper as a poet whom I can read on Sunday.
qtd. in
Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
90
From...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The Athenæum compared this novel favourably to the work of Jane Austen , saying that HM outstripped her predecessor in creating characters of a higher order of mental force and spiritual attainment, and offering to...
Literary responses Hannah More
Next year saw a rich crop of reviews. Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review, while praising HM 's style and her skill at manipulating her readers, damned the novel as over-moralized, strained and unnatural...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Chorley also wrote the note on FH in The Authors of England: A Series of Medallion Portraits, 1838, claiming for her a place of honour
Chorley, Henry Fothergill, and Achille Collas. The Authors of England. Charles Tilt, 1838.
1
among those treated there, strongly praising The Forest...
Literary responses Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
Two Belgian ministers of state wrote to express their appreciation.
Morgan, Sydney Owenson, Lady. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs. Editors Dixon, William Hepworth and Geraldine Jewsbury, AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
2: 391-2
Maria Edgeworth delighted even in the improbabilities of this book, and called its heroine wonderfully clever and preposterous—a Belgian Corinne.
qtd. in
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
222
The parallel...
Literary responses George Sand
The novel met with high praise from Balzac , and a critic at the Revue des Deux Mondes thought it better than anything by Germaine de Staël . These two knew the author's gender, but...
Literary responses Willa Cather
A review by Randolph Bourne in the USA levelled much the same criticisms as William Heinemann in England.
Cather, Willa. On Writing. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
96
H. L. Mencken , however, thought this book still more competent, more searching and convincing, better...
Literary responses George Sand
Ellen Moers , in her ground-breaking Literary Women, 1976, read Consuelo as a key step in the tradition of women writers presenting heroinism through the figure of the woman artist, especially the opera singer...
Literary responses Sydney Owenson Lady Morgan
De Staël is said to have had France read to her on her deathbed, with approbation.
Campbell, Mary, 1917 - 2002. Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson. Pandora, 1988.
149
Her lover Benjamin Constant defended Morgan from attack, and Morgan's own friend Lady Charleville , who had previously...
Literary responses Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier felt that this novel, together with LMC 's lives of Manon Roland and Germaine de Staël (first volume in The Ladies' Family Library) showed that polemical writing had not harmed her...

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