Although for many years her reputation rested largely on her critical works, de Staël has, since the 1970s, been viewed by feminist scholars as an important novelist. As a critic, de Staël is credited with inculcating the theories of Romanticism into French literary and political thought. Her belief that critical judgment is relative and based on a sense of history sharply altered the French literary attitudes of her time. In her De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; A Treatise on Ancient and Modern Literature), she delineated the distinction between the classical literature of southern Europe and northern Europe's Romantic literature. Feminist scholars have focused on de Staël's depiction of the oppressive effects of patriarchal hegemony. De Staël's novels Corinne; ou, L'Italie (1807; Corinne; or, Italy) and Delphine (1802) in particular have been praised by feminist scholars as perceptive...