2012/04/03 by Gillian Dow · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #French Literature and Criticism #Historical Art and Culture Studies #Historical and Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/09699082.2012.666414
openalex publication_date 2012/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Between 1795 and 1830, the French author Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830) published a large number of historical novels that were popular Europe-wide and translated into many languages, including English. Although French historical novels such as Germaine de Staël's Delphine (1802) and Chateaubriand's Atala (1801) have attracted the attention of Anglo-American Romanticists in the twentieth century, Genlis's similar works have been neglected. And yet in her own age, her novels were more widely read in Britain, and thus formed an important part of the Romantic literary landscape. They influenced British writers and readers, and received lengthy reviews in literary journals and periodicals. Using a wide range of sources in both French and English, this article investigates the reception of Genlis's historical novels in England. It rejects the opinion held by other scholars that these works were mere potboilers, written from a position of penury, reliant on the earlier romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and other précieuses of the seventeenth century, and conservative in the extreme. Instead, it argues—through a reading of Genlis's bio-bibliograpical survey De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature française (1811)—that Genlis's studies of “le grand siècle” of Louis XIV (which included Mademoiselle de Clermont [1802], La Duchesse de La Vallière [1804] and Madame de Maintenon [1806]) are about more than simple nostalgia for the Ancien Régime. It demonstrates that Genlis's work engaged directly with Romantic gender politics, implicitly critiqued the position of women under Napoleon, and inspired female readers and writers across Europe.