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.
ECK
continued through the later part of her life to cultivate relationships with royalty and the aristocracy, of her own nation and others. Her friendships with Lord St Vincent
and with Lady Aylesbury (or Ailesbury)
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Hervey
All this provides background for a story about EH
's behaviour later the same year. John Polidori
related that on Byron
's first visit to Mme de Staël
's chateau at Coppet in Switzerland...
Friends, Associates
Lady Caroline Lamb
LCL
's friendships with women writers (besides Morgan) would surprise anyone not taking her seriously as a writer. When Germaine de Staël
visited England, Lady Caroline was delighted to find her wearing a hat with...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Fanshawe
When CF
met both Byron
and Germaine de Staël
in spring 1814 at a dinner party at the house of Sir Humphry Davy
, she was unimpressed by Byron and his outpourings of radical opinion...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Inchbald
EI
first met both Maria Edgeworth
(with whom her friendship had begun two years earlier, when Edgeworth wrote to her in praise of A Simple Story) and Germaine de Staël
.
Manvell, Roger. Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London. University Press of America, 1987.
159-61
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.
v
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
Anna Brownell Jameson
The book is also a model of female erudition, peppered with foreign phrases, references to earlier Shakespeare critics, to the visual arts, and to other authors, including the ancient Greek dramatists and the German romanticists...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maria Jane Jewsbury
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
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...