Germaine de Staël was born into a time of stormy change, and she suffered the buffetings, in her life and in her writings, of its contradictory impulses. Her figure and her work acquire enhanced coherence if one considers her career as that of a person of exceptional gifts striving for what now would be viewed as a modern conception of womanhood--but a person hobbled and stranded at the crossroads: that intersection between the upper-class model of woman bequeathed to her by the Century of Light, and the popular drive toward the ideal of the equality of man that was to produce the French Revolution. But Staël has scarcely been envisaged in this light. The literary manuals have preserved the mention of her from her own day to this as one of the two women (the other being George Sand) worthy of canonic inclusion as...