Recommendations
Books Like Corinne, or Italy
Best books to read after Corinne, or Italy by Madame de Staël
Readers captivated by Staël's novel of female genius and Romantic Italy will find companion works in the French Romantic tradition she shaped, in the feminist novels she anticipated, and in the European Romanticism she helped define.
- 1Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
The novel written by Mme de Staël's longtime companion — Constant's Adolphe (partly based on their relationship) tells the same story from the lover's perspective; reading Adolphe alongside Corinne gives the full picture of the real relationship that underlies both texts and of the early French Romantic imagination.
- 2Buy
On Germany
by Germaine de Staël
Mme de Staël's critical masterpiece — the work that introduced German Romantic philosophy to France and coined the Classic/Romantic distinction; Napoleon banned it and had the first print run destroyed; reading On Germany alongside Corinne gives the intellectual framework for everything de Staël believed about culture and creative genius.
- 3Buy
René
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The companion French Romantic text — René and Corinne define the two poles of early French Romanticism: René is the male hero destroyed by excess of sensitivity; Corinne is the female genius destroyed by social convention; reading both gives the fullest picture of French Romantic feeling at the turn of the nineteenth century.
- 4Buy
Aurora Leigh
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The mid-Victorian novel-poem that is the most direct development of Corinne's argument about female creative genius — Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) tells the story of a woman poet who refuses to sacrifice her art to conventional domesticity; the most important development of Corinne's feminist theme in English.
- 5Buy
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
The Victorian novel that most directly inherits Corinne's theme — Eliot's Alcharisi (the opera singer who abandoned her child to pursue her art) is in direct dialogue with Corinne's argument about the impossibility of female creative freedom within conventional social structures; Eliot knew Corinne and the echo is deliberate.
- 6Buy
The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
The Victorian novel that is Corinne's most direct emotional heir — Maggie Tulliver's intellectual gifts exceed what her provincial world can accommodate, exactly as Corinne's gifts exceed what English society can accept; the parallel between the two doomed heroines of excessive feeling is one of the richest in European fiction.
- 7Buy
Italian Journey
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The travel narrative that is Corinne's most important predecessor in the genre — Goethe's account of his Italian journey (1786–1788) is the model for the Romantic artist discovering Italy as the land of art and sensuous life; de Staël knew Italian Journey and Corinne is partly in dialogue with it.
- 8Buy
The Letters of Madame de Staël
by Germaine de Staël (ed. Harold Nicolson)
De Staël's letters give the most direct access to the personality and intelligence that created Corinne — her correspondence with Constant, Necker, and the literary and political figures of the Napoleonic period shows the life from which the fiction emerged; the best biographical companion to Corinne.
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