Intimately experiencing the before and after of the French Revolution, Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)—as a novelist, historian, literary critic, political philosopher—helped pivot Enlightenment towards Romanticism (as did Rousseau and Kant). She grew up amid luminaries of Enlightenment Paris in the important salon her mother established before the Revolution. She popularized the term “Romanticism,” though her resistance to Napoleon marks her as someone not fully belonging to the Romantics. She was, in fact, a political liberal, indeed having a long partnership, and affair, with the great political philosopher Benjamin Constant.

Germaine’s father was the Swiss Jacques Necker, celebrated finance minister to Louis XVI. She became Madame de Staël marrying a man who would become the Swedish ambassador to France—a marriage of convenience. Her first lover was Bishop Talleyrand, the foremost diplomat in Europe for decades. Exiled from Paris by Napoleon, she traveled all over Europe (the poet and critic August Schlegel was a traveling companion), eventually repairing to Château Coppet on Lake Geneva, where she established a glittering salon, whose visitors included Byron.

Some comments on the 1802 epistolary novel Delphine are in order. The persona of Talleyrand is presented in the character of Mme. de Vernon (who addresses Delphine in our selection), whose scheming secures for her own daughter (Mathilde) the man Delphine loves (Léonce). With her broken heart, Delphine finds refuge in a convent, controlled by Léonce’s spiritually warped aunt, Mme. de Ternan.