Considered the foremost woman intellectual of the Romantic period, Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) exerted a lasting influence on European culture through the example of her remarkable life and the force of her fiction and critical writings. Originally published as An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Stael, this volume is the first to make a representative sample of her work available to English readers. The selections reflect the wide range of her interests; they include novellas, chapters from her novels, literary and sociological criticism, philosophical reflections, a...

Madame Germaine de Stael is often regarded as the "mistress to an age," or (like England and Russia) one of the three great European "powers" of the 19th century. She was in some sense both, but she was also an important and influential writer whose works, astonishingly, have not, until this volume, been translated into English since the early 19th century. She absorbed the leading ideas of the Enlightenment on literature, politics, science and the social order; turned many of them to her own uses and then bequeathed them to the 19th century, which adopted much of the Enlightenment through...

-- Capturing eloquent observations of the Napoleonic period's most politically outspoken woman, this definitive edition of Germaine de Stael's Dix Annees d'Exil recounts her flight across Europe just ahead of Napoleon's army. Translated by an award-winning scholar, Ten Years of Exile is the only unabridged English edition of this strong-minded and passionate woman's personal and political journal.