Madame de Stael - Goodden, Angelica (Fellow and Tutor, St Hilda's College, Oxford)

Madame de Staël's celebrity as a novelist, literary critic, and theorist made her the most famous woman in Europe in her day, on a par with her greatest foe, Napoleon. Yet almost all of her bestselling writings were the product of exile, to which she was repeatedly condemned for her political daring. Angelica Goodden explores the paradoxes of de Staël's existence.