Introduction

Summary

This book, fruit of some years of archival research, follows Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), daughter of Louis XVI’s minister Jacques Necker, from a childhood watched by Denis Diderot in her mother’s salon on to Revolution – during which the Bastille fell three days after her father’s dismissal – to her years with Benjamin Constant as the Republic died and her ten years of exile at Napoleon Bonaparte’s hands. It tracks her flight to Moscow, weeks ahead of Napoleon’s army, and on via Stockholm and London at last to Paris in 1814, three years before her early death. It follows Staël through a close reading of her manuscripts and publications, recreating her life as author and stateswoman and thereby reworking some received wisdom both about Staël’s various publications and about her literary and political action.