My romance with Madame de Staël.
I fell in love with Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) the first time I met her. We were introduced by Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author as well of two of the most marvelous books I know: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. I would read Mr. Holmes on any subject, so I was glad to discover his essay on Staël, originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2009 and since revised and collected in his volume This Long Pursuit, of whom I had little previous knowledge.
Holmes begins:
She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel—Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as “vulgaire.” She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart, / ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered.
Makes you want to read more about her, right? And you should. You’ll be astonished that a woman of such prominence and power in a tumultuous era is largely forgotten today, or remembered only for Corinne (which, in addition to being an excellent novel is also a pioneering scout in the literary territory of the higher travel writing; I included it in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die). But, while neglected today, her ambitious works of political and cultural analysis (On Germany, for example, and The Influence of the Passions Upon the Happiness of Individuals and Nations) have proven to be trenchant and prophetic. The extent of her influence in her own time is astonishing. “At the height of de Staël’s fame in 1814,” Holmes writes, “the French memoir writer Madame de Chastenay summed up her life in a single epigram. There were, she wrote, three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: ‘England, Russia, and Madame de Staël.’”
Tolstoy introduced her into the pages of War and Peace (indeed, much of his thinking about the cumulative influence of individual human wills upon history, most clearly articulated in the meditative chapter following his description of the devastating battle of Borodino, seems like an elaboration of Staël’s ideas on public opinion). Often quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she has also been name-checked by Meadow Soprano (season 2, episode 7, Wikipedia reports). So, in addition to extensive travels in her own time, both literal and figurative, she’s also gotten around a bit in ours. But not enough: she deserves to be more widely remembered, and invoked, as I hope to do again in this space as our relationship continues to develop.
Holmes again, rightly:
. . . she was a truly extraordinary woman who courageously created a new role in society, one even larger than that of her irrepressible heroine Corinne. This role was that of the independent, freelance, female intellectual in Europe.