“One of the First, If Not the Very First Woman of Her Age”: Germaine de Staël and Her Literary Posterity

As the quote taken from an 1817 issue of The New Monthly Magazine in her title suggests, Catriona Seth’s contribution delineates the paradoxical trajectory of Germaine de Staël’s literary career and the reception of both her writings and her persona throughout Europe. Seth’s extensive knowledge of the primary and secondary works that make up the Staël corpus places a fine point on Staël’s celebrity status as the double-edged sword that it was both promoting and denigrating the production of a woman writer whose legacy has as much to teach us about “women’s moments” of recognition in the nineteenth century as it does about similar moments in our own day.