Germaine de Stael

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and impact of Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) who Byron praised as Europe’s greatest living writer, and was at the heart of intellectual and literary life in the France of revolution and of Napoleon. As well as attracting and inspiring others in her salon, she wrote novels, plays. literary criticism, political essays, and poems and developed the ideas behind Romanticism. She achieved this while regularly exiled from the Paris in which she was born, having fallen out with Napoleon who she opposed, becoming a towering figure in the history of European ideas.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Catriona Seth 5 episodes
  Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford
• Alison Finch No other episodes
  Professor Emerita of French Literature at the University of Cambridge
• Katherine Astbury 4 episodes
  Associate Professor and Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick

Reading list

• The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Stael's 'De l'Allemagne', 1810-1813
  John Claireborne Isbell (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Google Books →
• Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction
  Michael Ferber (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• French Literature: A Cultural History
  Alison Finch (Polity, 2010) Google Books →
• Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France
  Alison Finch (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Google Books →
• Germaine de Stael: A Political Portrait
  Biancamaria Fontana (Princeton University Press, 2016) Google Books →
• A History of Women in the West (vol 4):Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War
  Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (eds.) (Belknap Press, 1993)
• Juniper Hall: An English Refuge from the French Revolution
  Linda Kelly (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991) Google Books →
• A History of Modern French Literature
  Christopher Prendergast (ed.) (Princeton University Press, 2017) Google Books →
• Delphine
  Germaine de Stael (trans. Avriel H. Goldberger) (Northern Illinois University Press, first published 1802; 1995)
• Corinne or Italy
  Germaine de Stael (trans. Sylvia Raphael) (Oxford University Press, first published 1807; 2008) Google Books →
• Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution
  Germaine de Stael (ed. Aurelian Craiutu) (Liberty Fund, 2008) Google Books →
• Madame de Stael
  Maria Fairweather (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005) Google Books →
• Germaine de Stael & Benjamin Constant: A Dual Biography
  Renee Winegarten (Yale University Press, 2008) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b09drjm1

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09drjm1

Auto-category: 840.9 (History and criticism of French literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Germaine de Stael was born in Paris in 1766, where her father was finance minister to Louis XVI and her mother held Dazzling Salon.