She will not be silenced
Germaine de Staël and why book bans ineffectively stifle expression
This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
Some books banned over the years may surprise you. Did you know Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was banned? How about Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “Benjamin Bunny”? (The bunnies had ‘too much privilege,’ apparently.) Or what about, “The Diary of Anne Frank”?
Some banned titles contain slightly risqué language but now contribute to the hallowed Western canon: James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut (the violence of war is obscene, but unfortunately that’s not what censors found offensive), “Leaves of Grass” by the expansive Walt Whitman, “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway.
Writing can be subversive. An author’s speech can only be limited by the production and distribution of material. Once a page is in a reader’s hand, the author speaks directly to whomever holds the page.
To the dismay of the powerful, removing books from distribution increases the appetite to read them. More people wanted to read D.H. Lawrence’s story of a wealthy woman’s affair with her gamekeeper than the book would have generated without the prurient interest. It’s likely the one Lawrence book most literary people can name. If it’s not taught in college courses today, it’s likely more to do with Lawrence’s limited impact on the 20th century novel than the sexy bits that earned the book an obscenity charge.
PEN America’s1 list of books banned in 2023 comprises about 580 authors, of whom less than 40% are male. Per the publishing industry, the percentage of published authors by gender mirrors the population: roughly 50-50. Since a greater percentage of women authors are banned (61%), the bans disproportionately target books by women.
This is not a small, unrepresentative sample. Over 1,400 individual books were banned in the first half of the 2022-2023 school year. Overwhelmingly, PEN states, bans have targeted books by and about people of color and LGBTQ+; I would add that they also targeted women writers. Often, the reasoning used was indecency. Bear in mind that among the banned authors are Homer and Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’ve been writing about women excluded from publishing their art, and today’s author reminds us of the time-honored history of using political power to shut women down, confronted by the courage of individual women writers to persist nonetheless. If you’ve never before met Germaine, or Madame de Staël, you are in for a treat.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein
Germaine Necker was born in 1766 to the Swiss-German banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a Swiss governess who became a respected salon hostess. Germaine grew up in a family that was connected at the highest levels politically and socially.
Her mother Suzanne Necker was gifted in mathematics and science, and took care to educate her daughter Germaine according to the principles of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Germaine regularly attended salon meetings with her mother, meeting the leading intellectuals of the day, such as Denis Diderot and Edward Gibbon. By the age of 13, she had read Montesquieu, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Dante.2
A precocious young girl, at age 11 she told her mother that she’d like to marry Edward Gibbon, so that he would always be available to her.3 Her parents’ social demands and lack of interest in restraining her, along with her intense intellectual development, allowed Germaine to become an independent thinker with a strong will, unafraid to speak her mind.
When she reached a marriageable age, young Germaine was courted by a future Prime Minister of England, William Pitt the Younger, among other notables. After rejecting other offers, she agreed to marry Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, a Swiss attaché to France. The match suited them both, although it wasn’t a marriage of affection. Germaine continued to write and socialize on her own, and the Baron continued to gamble the wealth she brought to the marriage.
Germaine also continued to associate with the salon society and became increasingly vocal about her political views. She was present at formative events in French history, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.4 She was a prominent member of the salon society, in which affluent citizens argued passionately their opinions on politics, philosophy, and the arts. Having voiced her suspicions of France’s trajectory toward tyranny, she was exiled for long periods repeatedly during the Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s rule.
While in exile, she founded the Coppet Group (Groupe de Coppet). This salon existed between the Napoleonic First Empire (1804) and the Bourbon Restoration (1814-15). De Staël called the Coppet guests “the Estates General5 of European opinion.”6
Through her adult life, she lived on and off in multiple European centers of intellectual thought. She enjoyed a complex love life with a succession of lovers who fathered children with her. She wrote incessantly: novels, plays, political and philosophical works. Goethe called her ‘an extraordinary woman’ in his correspondence. Schiller admired her intelligence and eloquence, but complained that she distracted him from completing his composition William Tell. She was a close friend to Lord Byron, who considered her Europe’s greatest living writer, but "with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink".7
(It’s impossible to write about Madame de Staël without shameless name dropping. She seems to have met and impressed every intellectual on the European continent during her life.)
Her nettled relationship with Napoleon made it increasingly difficult for her to publish. She implored Napoleon to stop his administrative state censoring her work. He responded by destroying 10,000 copies of a book she had just published. Only when Louis XVIII’s coronation restored the monarchy did she return to France.
After suffering a paralyzing stroke in 1817, de Staël lived the last five months of her life confined to her house. She died on the 28th anniversary of Bastille Day,14 July 1817, age 51.
De Staël captured her thoughts about women’s social and artistic roles in her arguably most famous novel, Corinne, or Italy. Let’s take a look.
Corinne, or Italy
The novel is an odd patchwork of themes: part travelogue in praise of Italy’s natural and artistic beauty, part romantic tragedy, part explication of nationalist tropes. The novel introduces the reader to the exotic lushness of 18th century Italy. Corinne herself acts as tour guide to the Scottish nobleman, Lord Nelvil, who’s enraptured by her beauty, talent, and charms. The Italy they tour is the font of European political, social, and artistic development. De Staël casts her British, French, Italian, and Germanic characters as emblems of the nations from which they hail. Italy, historically and literally, claims centrality in the novel’s contemporary Europe.
In a brilliant move, de Staël makes one exception to the rule she imposes with her title. Corinne is both emblematic of Italy and yet not solely an Italian citizen. She is a woman who has no home, a perpetual expatriate. Yet, she also embodies Italy. It’s a sleight of hand worth noting.
The novel in summary
The story surrounds a beautiful artist known only as Corinne, renowned in Italy for her many talents in poetry, acting, and singing. She’s also hostess extraordinaire to the greater European intelligentsia and wealthy who make regular pilgrimages to Italy. Secretive, passionate, bold, and yet extremely fragile, Corinne reveals her private life’s story only late in the book.
Lord Nelvil travels to Italy burdened with grief and guilt over his beloved father’s death and fretting over a proposed marriage in Scotland. Accompanied by a French noble, he’s introduced to the sensation known only as “Corinne,” and is immediately smitten.
Corinne is also attracted to Nelvil, reasons unknown, since Nelvil is everything she is not: cowardly, prosaic, austere, rigid, deeply patriotic to Scotland, dutiful to social mores. His attraction to her makes absolute sense, since she embodies the freedom and artistry missing in his life. Nelvil’s yearning for what is most distasteful to him—free spiritedness, feminine strength, disregard for propriety—creates the essential tension between the two protagonists. His attraction to Corinne becomes a source for his self-revulsion; Corinne as poetic empath internalizes his pain. Very few scenes are required to understand that this romance will not end happily.
Well into the novel, after the romance has developed to a place of trust, they share their histories with each other. Corinne’s back story is as familiar as Cinderella’s: born to a wealthy Scottish family living in Italy, she’s a child when her mother dies. Her father, whom she adores, remarries in Scotland. Corinne moves to Scotland at the insistence of her rigid stepmother, who prefers her own cloistered daughters to her stepdaughter Corinne. Upon the father’s death, Corinne sees no point in remaining in Scotland. She tells her stepmother of her intentions to leave, and the stepmother threatens her that if she does, she will be considered dead to the family and to the state. Corinne escapes for Europe, heedless of the threats.
She tells Nelvil that his father had considered Corinne and one of the stepdaughters for Nelvil’s marriage, and had decided that the stepsister was a better match for Nelvil.
Nelvil’s story is less dramatic. His father had arranged a marriage for him with a very young woman; Nelvil wasn’t convinced of the match but didn’t want to flout his father’s wishes outright. Young Nelvil travels abroad with his regiment, and explores the freedoms enjoyed by the continental wealthy. He has an affair with a French woman, which results in a pregnancy that he may or may not have fathered. In the end, he’s betrayed by the paramour.
Nelvil sends word to his father that he’s not interested in marrying the young woman chosen for him. He soon learns of his father’s death and feels the weight of terrifying guilt.
In this mind, and waiting for orders to rejoin his regiment, he travels to Italy, where he meets Corinne. With her, he’s strangely prudish about what people might think, despite his somewhat libertine escapades in France.
After they share their histories, it is of course Nelvil who’s appalled to learn of Corinne’s past behavior, regardless how chaste and honorable it is by comparison to his own. Corinne, though, isn’t disgusted by Nelvil’s history. Instead, she’s concerned about Nelvil’s reaction to her and she tries to soothe him.
After reacting over-dramatically to Corinne’s life story, and having behaved childishly out of jealousy for the acclaim given an artistic performance of hers, Nelvil impulsively decides to propose to Corinne. At the last moment, he receives his orders and prepares to return to Scotland. Corinne is crushed but stoically accepts his departure. Although she loves him and misses her stepsisters, she nonetheless can’t contemplate moving to Scotland and acting the role that would be expected of a wife. A move would require giving up her art, her independence, her agency.
In Scotland, Nelvil meets with Corinne’s stepmother, who’s eager for him to marry her daughter. The daughter has grown up and is more beautiful than before. She’s also entirely compliant and deferential.
Nelvil attends a party and a witness observes him with the daughter. Corinne has traveled to Scotland to speak with Nelvil, but having seen him with her beautiful stepsister, she’s convinced that Nelvil’s intentions are to marry her stepsister and not her. In reality, Nelvil is going through the motions with the stepsister. Corinne sends him her ring, with a note saying that he’s free. Nelvil takes this to mean that his love affair with Corinne is over, and he turns seriously to consider marrying the stepsister. Corinne returns to Italy.
The book ends with Nelvil, now married and the father of a daughter who resembles Corinne, travelling to Italy with his family, at his wife’s urging. He rushes to Corinne’s home upon hearing that she’s ill and on the point of death. Corinne has secluded herself in grief, and is wasting away. Nelvil arrives just as she dies.
Thoughts
Corinne conceptualizes the differences between her and Nelvil as those of the countries they’re meant to represent. Nelvil exemplifies Scottish reserve and religious austerity, while Corinne manifests the abundance and freedom of artistic expression of her home, Italy. He is cold and isolated; she radiates warmth to the legions of admirers who circulate around her.
Nelvil is every man who publicly prides himself on exceptional self-control, denying the lust that would make him common with other men. He’s the creator of his own soul-destroying conflict, prone to extravagant displays of emotion as he torments himself with jealousy of an accomplished woman he both adores and disdains. Life with Corinne will always be complicated for him, and he just wants a life of ease.
He, along with Corinne’s adoring pubic and multitudes of loving friends, cannot resist her magnetism and insightful artistry. When Nelvil and Corinne disagree, her argument is sound and his is feeble. And yet, reconciliation is a burden that only Corinne bears. She demurs to his vanity. She soothes his hurt feelings. She diminishes herself so that he can be made whole. By the end of the novel, he has a beautiful wife and daughter plus a grand estate, and Corinne has lost everything, including her life.
The novel intends that we recoil at the disparity between the feckless Nelvil and the accomplished Corinne, at the unfairness of her catering to his needs while hers go begging, at the unjust outcome for each of them. This, de Staël seems to be saying, is a woman’s lot: to be the most intelligent person in the room and still defer to the stupidest man. The novel also serves as a cautionary tale: the feminine impulse to care for others can be fatal if one doesn’t care for oneself.
The novel wasn’t the story of Germaine de Staël, although she may have interpreted the wreckage of her love affairs in creating a character who allows herself to be subservient to a lesser man. In Corinne, she didn’t paint a tableau of Italy so much as a portrait of a woman without a country, someone emblematic of every woman whose artistic expression has been shut down by powerful men who themselves are artless.
Paradoxically, the work itself was created by a woman whose art couldn’t be suffocated, even by the Emperor, Napoleon.
Another woman in a long line who persisted
Other female writers in this series overcame tremendous obstacles to having their work published and read, not least of which was the paucity of female authors who could serve as models. Some writers we’ve met were working class women, some had no formal education, some were vilified and mocked by powerful men.
From this, you might think that a wealthy woman provided the same resources as the successful writers of her day would not be shut down. Here is Germaine de Staël to disprove that assumption. She had every advantage in her education and connections. She was born with a fine intelligence and fiercely independent spirit, facts that were widely acknowledged by the rich and powerful of her time. She created salons in the major European centers of philosophical and artistic discourse. She was able to publish, and copies of her books numbered in the tens of thousands.
And yet: she was exiled for many years from her home country by Napoleon, who both feared her influence and was jealous of it. He used his power to silence her, destroying her books.
Napoleon was a small and mean man. Germaine was expansive and generous. He could not silence her. Germaine de Staël’s works have continued to influence women writers after her death, helping to make possible the millions of women who spend their lives expressing themselves artistically.
And sometimes, having their work banned. Consider this a badge of honor, an hommage to Mme. de Staël.
Thanks for reading,
Originally, PEN was an acronym for Poets, Essayists, Novelists; now it stand for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists. It’s inclusive of writers of any literary form.
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg; Michaelis, Johann David (1836). The Life of Carsten Niebuhr, the Oriental Traveller. T. Clark. p. 6.
See my post here for more on the French Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Olympe de Gouge’s counterpoint on the rights of women.
During the Ancien Régime, the Estates General was a legislative and consultative body consisting of three classes of French subjects. The body had no real power, and answered to the king.
Ellis, David (2011). Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816. Oxford University Press. p. 77.
Wilkes, Joanne (1999). Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition. London: Ashgate.