SOURCE: “Staël, Translation, and Race,” in Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823, edited by Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Kent State University Press, 1994, pp. 135-45.

In the following essay, Massardier-Kenney investigates de Staël's critique of cultural values in her work, particularly in the antislavery sentiment of Mirza.

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) is the only major woman author of the nineteenth century, with the exception of George Sand, who has managed to break through the silence in literary history surrounding women's writing during that time. Still, until recently her reputation has rested mostly on having introduced German Romanticism in France in De l’Allemagne (1810), on her opposition to Napoleon, and on her affair with Benjamin Constant, which he fictionalized in Adolphe. Her works have been hard to find and her major pieces had not been available in current re-editions. The...