Recommendations
Books Like Delphine
Best books to read after Delphine by Germaine de Staël
Readers who respond to Delphine's argument for female independence, its epistolary intensity, and de Staël's portrait of post-Revolutionary French society will find the wider tradition of the French Romantic novel of female genius.
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Corinne, or Italy
by Germaine de Staël
De Staël's second and more celebrated novel develops the same argument as Delphine in an Italian setting: Corinne is a woman of genius who, like Delphine, cannot be reduced to the conventional female role without destroying what makes her exceptional.
- 2Buy
Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
Constant's short novel of 1816 tells the same story as Delphine from the man's perspective: where Delphine shows the woman of intelligence who is destroyed by social convention, Adolphe shows the man who destroys such a woman through his inability to commit to his own feeling.
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Indiana
by George Sand
Sand's first novel (1832) is the direct inheritor of Delphine's argument: Indiana is another intelligent woman destroyed by a marriage she did not choose, arguing for romantic and personal freedom against the conventions of post-Revolutionary bourgeois society.
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's Maggie Tulliver is the English counterpart to de Staël's Delphine: a woman of exceptional intelligence and feeling in a provincial society that cannot accommodate her, whose love for a man who cannot commit to her ends in tragedy.
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Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
La Nouvelle Héloïse is the founding text of the French tradition of impossible love between a woman and a man of different social standing that Delphine inherits: Rousseau's Julie, like de Staël's Delphine, must renounce her authentic feeling for social duty.
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Félix Holt, the Radical
by George Eliot
Eliot's political novel, like Delphine, asks what happens when an intelligent woman's fate is determined by the politics and social ambitions of the men around her: the parallel between Delphine's post-Revolutionary France and Eliot's Reform-era England makes both novels legible as studies of the same problem in different historical settings.
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Cousin Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's account of a woman who uses her intelligence and independence destructively rather than nobly is the dark mirror of de Staël's Delphine: where Delphine's intelligence is destroyed by society's refusal to accommodate it, Cousin Bette's intelligence turns against a society that did the same thing to her.
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The Woman of Thirty
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's short novel, like Delphine, analyzes the situation of a woman trapped in a marriage she did not choose and the social impossibility of escaping it: Balzac was the most acute student of the social machinery that de Staël attacked in Delphine.
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