SOURCE: “Tragedy, Sisterhood, and Revenge in Corinne,” in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 212-32.

In the following essay, Heller evaluates the impact of de Staël's feminist narrative in Corinne on twentieth century readers.

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The publication of Avriel H. Goldberger's new translation of Germaine de Staël's Corinne ou l’Italie makes accessible to an American readership the novel that Ellen Moers, in her early pioneering study of women's literature, called “the book of the woman of genius” and whose “enormous influence on literary women” she traced throughout the nineteenth century (173, 174). Coinciding with a burgeoning interest in women's studies, Goldberger's translation comes at an opportune time. Thirty years ago, Staël's American biographer was content to write off her novels as period pieces; comparing Staël unfavorably to her contemporary, Jane Austen, J. Christopher Herold observed that while the problems of Austen's characters “are of...