Staël, Mme de

(1766-1817) (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baroness de Staël-Holstein)

   writer, salon hostess

   Mme de Staël was born in Paris, the daughter of the financier and statesman jacques necker. In 1786, she married the Swedish minister to France, baron de Staël-Holstein. Raised on the works of the philosophes (her first work was a eulogy to jean-jacques rousseau), she enthusiastically supported the revolution of 1789. Leaving France at the beginning of the terror (1793), but still wishing to play a political role, she took refuge in Switzerland, where she held a brilliant salon that drew many opponents to the French Revolutionary regimes, including the Directory. Returning to France in 1800, she incurred the hostility of Napoléon Bonaparte and was forced to leave again. Traveling throughout Europe, sometimes with benjamin constant, she lived what would become the romantic ideal, through the example of her passionate life and her writings. After 1800, her De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales underscores the importance of the heart and the imagination and asks for a new literature for a new age, presaging the ideas she would later develop in De l'Allemagne (1813), which show the aesthetic relativity and the fruitful contribution of cosmopolitan literature. The author calls for renewal of genres, and exalts sensibility and individualism, as is also found in her two novels, Delphine (1802) and Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807). In the latter work, one of her best known, Mme de Staël exerted enormous influence on literary women in Europe and the united States, challenging them to fulfill their hopes and aspirations for fame as it focused on the triumphant literary and artistic career of its heroine. Mme de Staël believed that through poetry also, one could experience the feelings of "souls at once exalted and melancholy." Her writings disseminated the themes and spirit of romanticism and, in her studies of German culture of the period, the aspects of Sturm und Drang.