SOURCE: “Exile and Narrative Voice in Corinne,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 91-105.

In the following essay, Coleman contends that the influential narrative voice of Corinne is traceable “to Staël's own experience with exile and other political expressions.”

Exile was a decisive experience for Germaine de Staël, shaping not only the course of her life but the character of her work as well. If women's fame, in Staël's phrase, can be defined as “le deuil éclatant du bonheur,”¹ her own reluctant career, out of which emerged such works as Corinne and De l’Allemagne, provides the most striking example of this intimate yet painful connection between separation and success. For in Staël's most important books the physical distancing of exile and the psychological separation of mourning combine to produce new connections between political, moral, and literary thought. In her masterpieces about Italy...