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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Madame de Stael Biography STAËL-HOLSTEIN, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de, commonly called Madame de Staël (1766–1817). A French authoress, born in Paris, April 22, 1766. She was the daughter of the Genevese banker and distinguished French Minister of Finance, Jacques Necker (q.v.), and of his wife, Suzanne Churchod, Gibbon's youthful beloved. She passed her childhood in one of the most brilliant literary salons of Paris, where her active mind was stimulated by association with the wits and critics of the pre-Revolutionary decade, chief among them F. M. Grimm, Thomas, Marmontel, and Raynal. In this vortex of disintegrating ideas she assimilated the intellectual spirit of that age. She married in 1786 the Swedish Minister, Baron de Staël-Holstein, by whom she had three children. She was independent, positive, self-assertive, and rather vain, writing much, but publishing nothing until the appearance of her Lettres sur Jean Jacques Rousseau (1788), whose social ideas she admired. She had fallen also under the spell of Goethe's Werther, and thus sympathized with the Revolution till the King's imprisonment caused a revulsion to an equally indiscreet incivism. She abused her ambassadorial right of asylum, and, fearing the consequences, left Paris before the massacres of September, 1792, going to Coppet, near Geneva, where she gathered some political sympathizers. In 1793 she tried to make herself the centre of a more important group in England, not without some personal scandal. For nine years (1794–1803) she played at politics in Paris, with brief visits to Coppet. She was amicably separated from Baron de Staël in 1797, and irritated Napoleon by her epigrams till the consular police banished her from Paris (1803). She went to Germany, and in her unwearying search for noted people to talk to she came in the winter of 1803–04 to Weimar. Goethe, at first excusing himself on the score of ill health, saw her, and later in his Annalen spoke of "her brilliant way of showing her readiness of thought and repartee." Schiller found her "with little ideality or poetry and no feminine reserve." The Romanticists were more attracted, and A. W. Schlegel (q.v.) became her companion and counselor. Thus the German ideas that she introduced into France were seen through Schlegel's eyes, far from impartially, as is constantly obvious in her De l'Allemagne, written in 1809–10 and printed in England in 1813. Before her exile Madame de Staël had written three essays, De l'influence des passions (1796); De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), and Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France, written in 1799, but not printed until 1806. Her literary power was first revealed in the novel Delphine (1802), a half autobiography of the "misunderstood woman," to be exploited later by George Sand. Much finer is a second story, Corinne (1807), wherewith she made the novel carry artistic discussion, as Goethe and Richter had done in Germany. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXI (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 434. |