The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël (review)

REVIEWS 81 Sabor and Doody have annotated liberally, explaining literary references and terms not necessarily familiar to the general reader, and provided as well a select bibliography, a chronology of Bumey, and several useful appendices. The appendix on "London" briefly summarizes the social geography of the city in Burney's day, indicating the connotations for an eighteenth-century reader of the place names used in the novel. An appendix on finance not only explains pounds, shillings, and pence together with the ramifications of Cecilia's financial situation, but suggests that for very approximate modem equivalents, the sums in the novel should be multiplied by "at least sixty." The problems of constructing an eighteenth-century "market basket" and then calculating a fair equivalence in modem pounds is indeed complicated. Sixty seems a well-educated guess, but it might be interesting to hear from readers about their own approximations— a subject of interest to us all. A final appendix on "Fashionable Amusements," prepared with the assistance of Melinda Finberg, briefly describes public places of amusement in Cecilia's London and general social customs. Scholars will undoubtedly prefer this edition of Cecilia for its textual accuracy and will appreciate the help that the various appendices and the annotation will give to students. A competing Virago-Penguin Cecilia (1986), set from a 1904 edition and with a new introduction by Judy Simons, is comparably priced but lacks any apparatus and makes no claims for textual accuracy. Elizabeth Brophy College of New Rochelle Charlotte Hogsett. The Literary Existence ofGermaine de Staël. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. xvi + 197pp. US$22.50. Many critics over the years have not been willing to take the writing of Germaine de Staël seriously for a variety of reasons: her colourful life, including many lovers, political activity, and exile by Napoleon; her mixing of the personal with supposedly objective writing; or simply a dislike on the critic's part of a woman writer of strong opinions and character. Among the recent scholars to treat her work with the seriousness it deserves are Simone Balayé and Madelyn Gutwirth, whose studies have been influenced by feminist approaches. Charlotte Hogsett, declaring herself to be in the line of these two scholars, treats the entire corpus of Mme de Staël's writing but concentrates particularly on her non-fiction. The book is directed both to the specialist and to the general reader. Specifically, Hogsett traces the way in which Staël in her various writings seeks a voice in which she, a woman in a society and a family that discourage women writers, can speak of the things that interest her, including politics. According to Hogsett, the author is at first uncertain; she accepts and even 82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION exaggerates social definitions of male and female roles, but at the same time feels the constraints of these definitions, and is not able to express herself effectively. With age and experience she ceases to put things into schematic categories she had tried to impose earlier (male-female, oversimplified national characteristics); she now recognizes the complexity of things, and has found a more effective, though indirect, way of expression. From her earliest work, Lettres sur les écrits et sur le caractère de JeanJacques Rousseau, Mme de Staël reveals her ambition, taking on a subject that might give pause to more mature writers. She then, according to Hogsett, proceeds to write books in pairs, one "feminine" and one "masculine," that is, a novel treating the sphere of private life and a work on more public matters, as in the pairs Delphine and De la littérature, Corinne and De l'Allemagne, and Dix ans d'exil and Considérations sur la révolutionfrançaise. Hogsett finds that in each pair, similar themes and structures are present. In Delphine and De la littérature, events unfold in time, as moments of perfection and happiness are followed by falls (thus belying the declared belief in progress in De la littérature). Corinne and De l'Allemagne are both "books of space," describing countries which serve to create a "topography of the soul." Dix ans d'exil and the Considérations both treat...