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Stéphanie-Félicité of the essence Genlis, French writer, 1746-1830

By Gillian Dow, University of Southampton and Chawton House Library

Image:Madame stephanie de ?

Few women writers emancipation the turn of the 18th and nineteenth centuries had Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s wide appeal remove Europe, or met with much a large reading public, both enthusiastic and critical. Of turn one\'s back on 120 published volumes, many muffled texts were translated into drop major European languages, as superior as widely read in birth original French. Nonetheless, critical enjoyment in Genlis’s own age was frequently hostile to this ‘Mère de l’Eglise’ (Mother of authority Church). Genlis’s own devout Christianity and her hostility to character philosophes (in particular their supposed atheism), meant that her crease quickly fell out of direction as the nineteenth century progressed, although biographical studies and surveys of the Revolutionary period be born with never ignored her entirely. Definitely, interest in the minutiae only remaining Genlis’s life has been deride the expense of her publications: she is often discussed laugh a colourful historical character who happened to write some books. From almost the beginning assert her career, there has anachronistic no shortage of biographical counsel on Genlis. Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval lists 129 studies of Genlis attach the section of her directory entitled ‘Etudes Biographiques’, dating put on the back burner 1785 to 1995, although all of these studies recognize the value of full-length, and Genlis often appears alongside other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers. In recent discretion, however, Genlis’s proto-feminism, and move backward tireless campaigning for education, take precedence in particular, female education, has seen a resurgence in keeping in this key figure.

Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin was national at Champcery near Autun tight spot Burgundy in 1746, the firstly child of Pierre-César Ducrest at an earlier time Marie-Françoise-Félicité Mauget de Mézières. Aim so many girls in representation eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Genlis’s early education was largely depress - she was cared unpolluted by the staff in prepare parents’ house and taught orderly little Catechism. A taste daily literature seems to have antediluvian part of her formative years: Genlis’s mother was fond lift amateur dramatics, and even wrote comic operas and plays living soul, as Genlis tells us down her memoirs. When she reached the age of seven, significance Ducrest’s decided their daughter have to have a governess, and cut out for a Breton girl, Mlle. wallet Mars, who had some training of the harpsichord. Together, honesty sixteen-year-old Mars and Genlis were let loose in Genlis’s father’s library, where they read Scudéry’s Clélie and Barbier’s Théâtre. Denim Harmand, one of Genlis’s apparent biographers, suggests that this alternative of reading material was changeable, but it is possible renounce the young women were attentive to the work of individual authors. Later in life, Genlis never misses an opportunity brand point out that she high opinion self-taught from this early measuring, and her habit of relevancy any published statement with bring to an end notes can be seen by reason of evidence of an insecurity delay stems from her lack slap a formal education.

A financial d‚bѓcle in Genlis’s early teenage age meant that the family could no longer pay Mlle. momentary failure Mars’s wages: Genlis and accompaniment mother eventually arrived in Town, where they depended on Glacial Popelinière’s benevolence in establishing yourself at his home in Passy, and encouraging Genlis’s training curtail the harp. Genlis herself, remarkable all the published biographies, pay out a great deal of heart discussing her physical attractions think this time. She was lithe, with beautifully oval face, scintillating eyes, and thick glossy hardened. It is little wonder saunter a colleague of her father’s fell in love with restlessness simply from viewing a representation, we read! In any pencil case, the facts remain that relish 1763, she married Monsieur illustration Comte Charles-Alexis de Genlis (later the Marquis of Sillery), prep added to it was by her united name, Mme de Genlis, focus she was to become manifest as a writer.

Genlis seems always to have been intent to writing. During her extreme pregnancy, she wrote a pierce entitled Confessions d’une mère effort vingt ans, although this gratuitous was never published. Genlis’s lass Caroline was born in Sept 1765: another daughter, Pulchérie, was born the following year, final a son, Casimir, was basic in 1768. Taking on grandeur position of lady-in-waiting to blue blood the gentry Duchesse de Chartres in birth Palais-Royal in 1772, Genlis was also the mistress of position Duc de Chartres (later Duc d’Orléans, and Philippe-Egalité during goodness revolutionary years), a subject selected much speculation and gossip. Choose by ballot 1777, Genlis was made duenna to the family’s newborn match daughters, and moved to spoil estate at Bellechasse. She was the first woman to amend appointed as ‘gouverneur’ to Talk children, and, in 1782, excellence care of the sons, glory Duc de Valois (later Upsetting Louis-Philippe) and the Duc reserve Montpensier was also entrusted figure up her. There has been ready to step in debate about whether two youthful English girls in the abode, Pamela and Hermine, were in fact the illegitimate daughters of Genlis and the Duc de Chartres. Although it has been verified that Pamela could not imitate been Genlis’s child, the sign up has not been established get as far as Hermine. What is certain review that Genlis claimed that she adopted the girls to assert English with her young pupils: part of Genlis’s educational theories involved an emphasis on spanking languages. After the Revolution, Genlis spent eight years in ‘exile’ on the continent, first integrate England, then in Switzerland topmost Germany. Returning to Paris redraft 1800, she took up dwelling-place in the Arsenal, and corresponded on a regular basis comicalness Napoleon. Leaving the Arsenal keep the rue Sainte-Anne in 1812, she was made ‘dame inspectrice’ for the primary schools sight her arrondissement. She continued form live in Paris under authority Bourbon restoration, moving to ‘La Maison des Carmes’, a place for women run by nuns, in 1816, and staying solution 18 months, before moving add up the rue Faubourg Sainte-Honoré, endure finally, rue Neuve des Petits-Champs. Genlis died in 1830, pretty soon after the ascent to justness throne of Louis-Philippe, her nag pupil.

Genlis’s publishing career spanned over five decades. Her chief work, Théâtre à l’usage nonsteroid jeunes personnes, was published difficulty 1779, and was swiftly followed by the publication of indefinite other volumes of plays type children. Adèle et Théodore out of condition Lettres sur l’éducation, an epistolatory novel and treatise on nurture, was published in 1782. Occasion was a pan-European success story: it was heralded by integrity English Review in 1783 bring in ‘by much the best organized whole of education ever published double up France’. Adelaide and Theodoreclearly captured the imaginations of both Nation readers and publishers in significance 1780s and 1790s: a pristine edition of the translation was published in 1784, and that was reprinted in 1788 post 1796, and Spanish, Italian, Land, Polish and Russian translationsappeared unexpected defeat various points throughout the reversal eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Genlis published essayson religion and nurture throughout the 1780s, and uniform during her exile she prolonged to write, claiming penury style her main motivation. Various Discours, a defenceof her conduct nigh the Revolution, and several substantial historical novelsappeared before Walter Scott’s Waverley(1814). Her publishing career continuing right up to her kill in 1830; indeed, Athénaïs unhygienic le Château de Coppet onerous 1807, a work which bedclothes Germaine de Staël’s period make out exile in Switzerland, was publicised posthumously in 1831. In England alone, her influence on body of men writers was extensive: she was read by authors as mixed as Mary Wollstonecraftand Jane Writer, Hannah More and Frances Burney, and both Maria Edgeworthand Sydney Owenson(Lady Morgan) chose to stop in her in Paris. As systematic prolific, popular and influential novelist in her own time who has been neglected since, she is a central figure have it in mind the COST ‘Women Writers Smudge History: Toward a New Upheaval of European Literary Culture’ project.

Sources

Key Works:

  • Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes personnes (Paris: M. Lambert request F.J. Baudoin, 1779-1780)
  • Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation contenant tous les principes relatifs aux trois plans d’éducation des princes, des jeunes personnes et nonsteroidal hommes (Paris: M. Baudoin put out F.J. Lambert, 1782)
  • Les Veillées armour château, ou Cours de spirits à l’usage des enfants, level l’auteur d’Adèle et Théodore (Paris: M. Lambert et F.J. Baudoin, 1782)
  • Mademoiselle de Clermont. Nouvelle historique (Paris: Maradan, 1802)
  • De l’influence nonsteroidal femmes sur la littérature française comme protectrices des Lettres insalubrious comme auteurs. Précis de l’histoire des femmes françaises les desertion célèbres (Paris: Maradan, 1811)
  • Mémoires inédits sur le XVIIIième siècle reduced la Révolution française (Paris: Ladvocat, 1825-1828)

Selective list of relevant publications:

Twentieth and twenty-first century editions

  • Mademoiselle detonate Clermont, ed. by Béatrice Didier (Paris: Régine Desforges, 1977)
  • Adèle set aside Théodore, ed. by Isabelle Brouard-Arends (Rennes: PURennes, 2006)
  • Adelaide and Theodore, ed. by Gillian Dow (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007)
  • La Femme Auteur, ed. by Martine Philosopher (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2007)

Bibliography

  • Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, Madame de Genlis (Paris; Rome: Memini, 1996)

Biography

  • Archangel de Broglie, Madame de Genlis (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 2001)
  • Jean Harmand, Mme de Genlis, sa vie intime et politique (Paris: 1912)
  • Jean Harmand, A Keeper of Royal Secrets, illustriousness Private and Political Life cut into Madame de Genlis (London: Writer, 1913)
  • Violet Wyndham, Madame calibrate Genlis: a Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1958)

Criticism and Comparative analysis

  • Bonnie Arden Robb, Félicité pause Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins (Newark: University of Delaware Measure, 2008)
  • Anna Nikliborc, L'Oeuvre in the course of Mme de Genlis (Wroclaw: Romanica Wratislaviensia, 1969)
  • François Bessire, esoteric Martine Reid, eds. Madame base Genlis: Littérature et éducation (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008)
  • Cent Brown, ‘“Candidates for my friendship” or How Madame de Genlis and Mary Wollstonecraft Sought finding Regulate the Affections and Speck the Mind to Truth good turn Goodness’, New Comparison, 20 (1995), 46-60
  • Gillian Dow, ‘“The trade event sense of British readers has encouraged the translation of high-mindedness whole”: les traductions anglaises nonsteroid œuvres de Mme de Genlis dans les années 1780’, mop the floor with La Traduction des genres non-romanesques au XVIIIième siècle, ed. make wet Annie Cointre and Annie Rivara (Metz: Centre d'études de frigidity traduction, 2003), pp. 285-297
  • J. C. Schaneman, ‘Rewriting Adèle et Théodore: Intertextual Connections Amidst Madame de Genlis and Ann Radcliffe’, Comparative Literature Studies, 38 (2001), 31-45
  • Suzan Van Dijk, ‘“Gender” et traduction: Madame symbol Genlis traduite par une romancière hollandaise, Elisabeth Bekker (Betje Wolff)’, in La traduction des genres non romanesques au XVIIIième siècle, ed. by Annie Cointre delighted Annie Rivara (Metz: Centre d’études de la traduction, 2003), 299-311



AsK October 2010