Ruth's Reviews > Madame de Stael

In the 18th century, there were three great powers in Europe: Britain, Russia and Madame de Staël.

This sentence was enough for me to want to read about this woman. She was one of the main Napoleon opponents, a great writer and a unique thinker. The inventor of comparative literature and the term 'romanticism'. She was an early celebrity: someone about whom everyone had a view.
Her marriage and love life was just as intriguing and unorthodox as her political and creative life to me.

The first quarter of a book was a struggle; I only persisted because of the reasons above. The book was talking about her immediate family and early life; I didn't find it very exciting, it was a bit repetitive and long in my opinion. I almost gave up. But then things came into full swing. Interesting historical events overlapped with Germain's personal development and growth and created a fascinating picture, and suddenly I couldn't put the book down.

This woman was an intellectual giant. Brave and devoted friend. She was vocal and opinionated, and she was not attractive (how dare she!)

"Byron found it hard to forgive the middle-aged authoress for not being good-looking. To Lady Melbourne he declared: ‘I never go near her – her books are very delightful, but in society I see nothing but a very plain woman forcing one to listen and look at her with her pen behind her ear and her mouth full of ink."

In Russia: "Ladies and gentlemen gathered to gape at her. For the most part they were not pleased. They saw a fat woman of fifty, dressed inappropriately for her years. Nor did her manners please. People found her speeches too long and her sleeves too short."

She was a woman of many talents - a dramatist, a talented actress, director and designer – all these made her a uniquely exciting theatre critic as well, irresistibly drawing in her audience.

She was exiled for a decade because she wouldn't conform, emotional and unreserved, but yet her thinking always clear and never muddled by her emotions, even on her deathbed. Always an activist, a committed political thinker and an analyst of human behaviour she believed passionately that literature could not be separate from political and social conditions of a country.

"‘She is good, easy to be with, grateful for a nothing . . . I don’t know whether her head or her heart is the most warm. Those two enemies have great difficulty in getting on together. The richness of her mind enchants and irritates, she is paradoxical in discussion and if the word sensibility is mentioned, off she goes! But what grace and kindly desire to show everyone at their best! What eloquence, what improvisation, what spirit!’"

It was exciting to read about her literary success, to witness how her ideas swept two continents.

"Madame de Staël encouraged the development of a national spirit which might help each country to discover its own character and express it in its own way, thereby enriching European civilization as a whole."

Her books usually sold out just months after publishing. Again and again, she proved to sceptics (mildly put) like Lord Byron and eventually even Napoleon that they better listen and take her ideas into account, and better not make her an enemy.

"The book sold out in three days in its French edition and sold 2,250 copies in English by the end of the year. Madame de Staël was now the literary as well as the political and social star of the season, putting Byron’s nose out of joint."

Byron: "‘I do not love Madame de Staël but depend upon it – she beats all your natives hollow as an Authoress – in my opinion – and I would not say this if I could help it.’ In his diary he admitted: ‘she is a woman by herself and has done more than the rest of them together, intellectually – she ought to have been a man’"

The quality of her observations and analysis of nations, social orders and governments put her on the same level as men in an era when women were thought to be significantly inferior to men in intellect."

Some of my favourite quotes of Stael:

"‘My passion is my genius’."

"Self-improvement, not happiness, should be the chief aim of human life – overcoming suffering is a condition of moral progress."

"diversity is in itself praiseworthy, for in literature as in so many other fields, unanimity is almost always a sign of servitude."

"Man must be believed capable of making a choice and be free to make it. It follows that no form of domination by any one human being over another is permissible; human dignity and liberty are pre-eminent."

Madame de Staël maintained that original thinking was more important than good taste.

There is so much more! My next step after reading this is to read some of her work. Yesterday I received her "Politics, Literature and National Character" and I cannot wait to start reading.

Here are the books that I added to my reading list following this book:
- On the Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations
- Napoleon's Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand
- The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe
- On Germany
- Ten Years of Exile
- Lettres about Jean-Jacques Rousseau