Famous for standing up to Napoleon, Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein, “Madame de Staël” (1766–1817), was a celebrated novelist, philosopher, feminist, correspondent, playwright, Saloniere, and cultural icon. A veritable “Femme de lettres” and arguably France’s first public female intellectual, de Staël was a woman whose writings promoted the tenets of a pan-European Romanticism, a notion coined in collaboration with her lifelong confidant and tutor to her children, the philosopher August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845). De Staël’s cosmopolitan vision extended beyond the national borders of France to embrace the idea of a shared global literature. Her creative output was prodigious and includes treatises on philosophy, politics, history, and culture, as well as sentimental novels, and a sizable correspondence. To this day, her oeuvre is read and studied as the outpourings of an early feminist, liberal, and transnationalist. De Staël is particularly well known for her treatise De l’Allemagne [On Germany] (1813) which advocates a “republic of letters” as the model for any modern society. De l’Allemagne led to a veritable travel fever and ushered in a century of cross-cultural exchanges, in which English, American, and German poets and philosophers participated, as well as their French counterparts.