Abstract: This book describes Staël's life in exile as the crucial experience shaping her literary and political identity. It relates her inner, private exile as an oppressed and thwarted woman in a society with restrictive and conventional norms of decorum to the outer, public exile of one who suffered banishment as a result of daring to criticize authoritarian regimes. This tension made her a living paradox in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A member of the downtrodden sisterhood who longed to be politically active, but knew that her sex excluded her in practical terms from the world stage, she was torn between the need to appear a ‘proper lady’ and the desire to write in socially and intellectually daring (or ‘male’) ways. Yet although she was regarded by her political masters as simply too dangerous to be tolerated in France, her subversive writings — particularly the novels Delphine and Corinne and the Romantic digest De l'Allemagne — made her appear as much a threat outside her homeland as within it, an irritant to despotic political regimes, and a cosmopolitan who lived, socialized, and observed wherever she went (England, Germany, Italy, and Russia) and afterwards wrote to explosive effect about the experience. Exile served only to give this European celebrity, the friend of statesmen and soldiers as well as of literary figures like Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Fanny Burney, a public voice that infuriated her political antagonists, increasing her determination to escape entrapment and proclaim the virtues of freedom and enlightenment wherever she went.

Keywords: Staël, exile, proper lady, private life, public life, Napoleon, political novel, Romanticism, Byron, Fanny Burney