Sta�l, Madame de, pseudonym of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baroness of Sta�l-Holstein 1766-1817
French writer

She was born in Paris, the only child of the financier and statesman, Jacques Necker. In her girlhood she attended her mother's salon and turned to writing romantic comedies, tragedies, novels, essays and the celebrated Lettres sur Rousseau (1789). In 1786 she married Baron Eric Magnus of Sta�l-Holstein (1742-1802), the bankrupt Swedish ambassador in Paris. She bore him three children, but the marriage was unhappy and she had many affairs. Her brilliant Parisian salon became the centre of political discussion, but with the Revolution she had to leave for Coppet, by Lake Geneva, in 1792. By 1795 she had returned to Paris, where her husband had re-established himself as ambassador. She prepared for a political role by her R�flexions sur la paix int�rieur (1795, 'Reflections on Civil Peace'), but was advised to return to Coppet. Her Influence des passions appeared in 1796. She published her famous Litt�rature et ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Eng trans The Influence of Literature upon Society, 1812) in 1800, followed by the novel Delphine (Eng trans 1903) in 1802. She had returned to Paris but Napoleon I made her unwelcome. In December 1803, now a widow, she set out with her children for Germany, where she dazzled the Weimar court and met the German writers Schiller, Goethe and August von Schlegel. In 1805 she returned to Coppet and wrote Corinne (1807, Eng trans 1807), a romance which brought her fame throughout Europe. She visited Germany at the end of 1807, and her famous work De l'Allemagne (Eng trans Germany, 1813) was finished in 1810 and partly printed, when the whole impression was seized and destroyed, and she herself was exiled. She escaped secretly to Berne, and from there made her way to St Petersburg, Stockholm and (1813) London, where admiration reached its climax on the publication of De l'Allemagne. It revealed Germany to the French and made Romanticism - she was the first to use the word - acceptable to the Latin peoples. Louis XVIII welcomed her to Paris in 1814, but the return of Napoleon drove her away, and she spent the winter in Italy with Albert de Rocca, an Italian officer in the French service, whom she had married secretly in 1816. She returned to Paris, where she died. Her surviving son and daughter published her unfinished Consid�rations sur la R�volution fran�aise (1818, Eng trans Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, 1818) - considered her masterpiece by the great French literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve - the Dix ann�es d'exil (1821, Eng trans Ten Years' Exile, 1821), and her complete works (1820-21).