Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
-
Standard Name: Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de
Birth Name: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest
Married Name: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis
Titled: Caroline Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis
Used Form: Stephanie-Felicite de Genlis
Used Form: Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Countess of Genlis and Marchioness
of Sillery
SFG
, French aristocrat, royal mistress, and later a political refugee in England, made her mark as an educational theorist and writer for children (plays, stories, and good advice) during the decade leading up to the French Revolution. She also published adult novels, romances, and an autobiography. In England at least it was her writing for children that was admired and influential.
HM
sent a copy to Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
, from whose bible plays, as she acknowledged in the accompanying letter, she had taken her generic idea.
Dow, Gillian. “The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writings for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 3, pp. 367-81.
375
Her volume (full title Sacred Dramas: chiefly intended...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Bannerman
The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch
and another based on Goethe
's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
She also wrote for school performance two short plays of slily political import, perhaps after reading Genlis
's Théâtre à l'usage des jeunes personnes, 1780. She must have enjoyed dramatic writing, since after seeing...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
The title echoes Les Veillées du Chateau by Genlis
, transposed for middle-class rather than upper-class children.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
324
A framing narrative tells how the parents of a large family solicit fables, dialogues, and so on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Barbara Hofland
The title-page quotes from Spenser
, and the first chapter from Johnson
's Rambler. This sophisticated novel, with a North Yorkshire setting, a large cast of upper-class characters, and a wide range of reference...
The Maniac deals with the effects of the Irish Rebellion. The narrator, Albert, has gone mad after returning home to find his house sacked and wife and children murdered. His sister, Emma, also dies and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Charlotte Bury
The title-page quotes Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
on gentle sentiments and dangerous passions. In the novel Donneraile, heir to a peerage, is persuaded by his father to marry Sophia Dickens, only child of a rich merchant...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Wollstonecraft
MW
was replying to a number of authoritative male texts about the nature of women: by Burke
(who in Reflections on the Revolution in France had glorified Marie-Antoinette
and dismissed non-queenly femininity as animal), Rousseau
Intertextuality and Influence
Clara Reeve
In this ground-breaking study CR
provides the first full critical and historical account of the modern novel form (the one most used by women writers), and defends the genre of romance against its many attackers...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Martha Sherwood
MMS
began making up stories in her sixth year, but wrote later, what they were I have not the least idea. I was too young to write them down; but when I had thought of...
Literary responses
Mary Charlton
This novel, although it seems not to have been remembered in the course of MC
's later career, received three lengthy reviews in serious periodicals. William Enfield
in the Monthly, quoted above, said he...
Occupation
Frances Arabella Rowden
Girls at the school were taken on alternate Sundays to the chapel at the British embassy and to the French Protestant L'Eglise de l'Oratoire. Afterwards they were required to write down from memory the...
Performance of text
Elizabeth Inchbald
EI
's The Child of Nature, an adaptation of de Genlis
written in ten days, opened.
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press.
5: 1114
Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London. University Press of America.
36
Author summary
Sarah Trimmer
ST
's writing arose out of her work for two causes, religion and education, brought most closely together in her interest in Sunday schools. She edited magazines and was a pioneer both in animal stories...
