Madame de stael biography books

The influence of the salons of Paris on the thought and culture of the 18th century would be difficult to overstate. These meeting places were presided over by brilliantly clever women, and Madame de Stael was the cleverest. She was married to a secretary in the Swedish embassy. She found him clumsy and so began to take lovers. This is her story.

The influence of the salons of Paris on the thought and culture of the eighteenth century would be difficult to overstate. They were both intellectual powerhouses and also assemblies where the latest and most extreme fashion was displayed.

'Young gallants...wearing silk waistcoats embroidered with Chinese pagodas, making love to ladies reclining negligently against the cushions...or accepting small cups of chocolate from the hands of Negro pages', thus Harold Nicolson describes the drawings of the time in his book "The Age of Reason". These meeting places for the vanguard of society were presided over

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The Great de Staël

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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.

Though married to the handsome Swedish ambassador (or possibly because she wa

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Germaine de Staël

Swiss/French author (1766–1817)

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (French:[anlwizʒɛʁmɛndəstalɔlstajn]; née Necker; 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817), commonly known as Madame dem Staël (French:[madamdəstal]), was a prominent philosopher, woman of letters, and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonist and writer. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.^[3]

Her presence at critical events such as the Estates General of 1789 and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen underscored her engagement in the political discourse of her time.^[4] However, Madame dem Staël faced exile for extended periods: initially