Madame de Staël: The Dangerous Exile (review)

Angelica Goodden begins her biography of Germaine de Staël with questions which suggest that the focus of the work will be on Staël’s writing: ‘[h]ow does writing beget exile, and exile writing? What kind of writing can both be fuelled by absence and prolong it?’ (p. 1). The reader with a passing familiarity with the subject knows the rudiments of the answer to those questions in Staël’s case: the kind of writing, especially writing by a woman, that upsets Napoleon; first-hand experience of other cultures; and favourable commentary on those cultures implying further criticism of Napoleonic France. Three hundred and thirty-two pages later, that reader may well have a much better grasp of the details of Staël’s life in exile, but may not be overwhelmed by what has been added to our understanding of its relation to her writing. Indeed, significant parts of this book are not really about Staël or her works at all. The first chapter is a case in point: at a rough calculation, half of it is focused on Fanny Burney, and focused in such a way as to serve more as an essay on Burney than as a contribution to our understanding of Staël’s situation as an exiled woman in England. When the author does write about Staël, she is given to bold claims: Staël is identified variously as the first female literary critic; the founder of comparative literary studies; the most famous person in Europe, apart from Bonaparte; and crucial to Wellington’s decision to reduce the numbers of troops occupying Paris. The hyperbole continues in references to the ‘severe deprivation’ and ‘savage reprisals’ (p. 303) of Staël’s exiles, and at one point it is even claimed that she ‘knew as much about the pain of displacement as the slaves shipped from Africa’ (p. 260). Given the comfortable material circumstances of Staël’s exiles, spent largely in the intellectual centres and country houses of Europe, a more acute sense of perspective would have better served Goodden’s valid underlying point, namely that Staël’s double political exile for her views and for her gender occasioned genuine psychological suffering. The real interest of this book lies in its exploration of the creative ways in which Staël turned this double exile to intellectual advantage. Forced to travel, she seized the opportunity to learn about foreign cultures and to expose her own ideas to the scrutiny of the foreign elites whose company she cultivated, and exploited the privileged rhetorical position of the outsider to great effect in her works. Although we might wish for more sustained and innovative analysis of those works than is provided here, Goodden gives many illuminating examples, and points clearly to the tension between Staël’s desire for personal freedom and her shifting but ultimately conservative views on the position of women in general.