Staël, Mme de. Née Germaine Necker (1766-1817)
French author of Swiss parentage, daughter of the French Minister of Finance and wife of Baron de Staël-Holstein, ambassador to France from Sweden. She is known for her celebrated salons, which were attended by the leading literary and political figures of the day, for her sensibility and kindness in personal relations, her talent for conversation, her vigorous mind, and her influence on the movement of Romanticism in France. Among her works are Lettres sur les Écrits et le Caractère de Jean Jacques Rousseau ( 1788); De l'Influence des Passions ( 1796); Essai sur les Fictions; Delphine ( 1802) and Corinne ( 1807), called by some critics the first "modern" novels in their view of French society, anticipating the works of George Sand ; De la Littérature ( 1800), criticism, in which she was among the first to break away from neo-Classical principles and which caused a sensation on its publication; De l'Allemagne ( 1813), a study of German literature, which introduced German romanticism into France and was at first suppressed on orders by Napoleon; and Considérations sur la Révolution Française ( 1818).
Mme de Staël had an eventful career, being exiled from France after the Revolution of 1789, allowed to return in 1795, and banished again later by Napoleon, of whom she was an outspoken critic. She had several disappointing love affairs, the chief of which involved the Don Juan-like Swiss novelist Benjamin Constant; Chateausriand and she were rivals in the literary world. Her influence has been found in Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Charles Nodier in poetry and criticism; Cousin, Ticknor, and Prescott in the study of the German language; and Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin in the study of English and German literature.
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