Corinne; Or, Italy - Volume I (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press) (Paperback)

Baronne Anne Louise Germaine de Stael-Holstein (nee Necker) (1766-1817), commonly known as Madame de Stael, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1788 she appeared as an author under her own name (Sophie had been already published, but anonymously) with some Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau, a fervid panegyric which demonstrated evident talent but little in the way of critical discernment. She was at this time, and indeed generally, enthusiastic for a mixture of Rousseauism and constitutionalism in politics. In 1802 she published the first of her really noteworthy books, the novel Delphine, in which the Femme Incomprise was in a manner introduced to French literature, and in which she herself and not a few of her intimates appeared in transparent disguise. In 1807 Corinne, the first aesthetic romance not written in German, appeared. It is in fact, what it was described as being at the time of its appearance, a picaresque tour couched in the form of a novel.