Recommendations
Books Like Ten Years of Exile
Best books to read after Ten Years of Exile by Germaine de Staël
Readers who respond to de Staël's memoir of her Napoleonic exile, her portrait of Russia in 1812, and her account of the European liberal world that opposed Napoleon will find the wider tradition of Romantic political memoir.
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Mémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
Chateaubriand's great autobiography, like Ten Years of Exile, is a Romantic memoir written against Napoleon: both de Staël and Chateaubriand were Napoleon's most distinguished political opponents, and their memoirs together provide the most complete literary account of the Napoleonic period from the opposition perspective.
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Corinne, or Italy
by Germaine de Staël
Corinne is the novel that de Staël wrote during the period covered by Ten Years of Exile: the biography of Corinne, as the woman of genius exiled from the world that would have sustained her, mirrors the biography of de Staël herself as the intellectual in exile from Napoleon's France.
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Napoleon
by Emil Ludwig
Emil Ludwig's 1925 biography of Napoleon is the best introduction to the figure whom Ten Years of Exile is written against: understanding Napoleon's character, methods, and obsessive hatred of de Staël illuminates the personal and political dimensions of her exile memoir.
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De l'Allemagne
by Germaine de Staël
De l'Allemagne (1810/1813) is the book that Napoleon destroyed and that de Staël was completing during the period Ten Years of Exile describes: the memoir and the critical work were products of the same exile, and reading both together shows how de Staël transformed political persecution into cultural achievement.
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The Diary of a Nobody in Exile
by Various (war diaries)
The genre of exile writing — the journal, diary, or memoir produced under conditions of forced displacement — to which Ten Years of Exile belongs includes a range of works across different periods and languages: de Staël's memoir is the founding French Romantic example of this form.
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Adolphe
by Benjamin Constant
Constant, de Staël's most intimate intellectual companion during much of the exile period, published Adolphe in 1816 (the year before de Staël died); the novel's analysis of a love that cannot be sustained by the will of either party reflects the personal relationship between Constant and de Staël over the decade of exile.
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My Past and Thoughts
by Alexander Herzen
Herzen's great Russian memoir (1852–68), also written in exile from Russia, is the nineteenth-century memoir that most closely parallels Ten Years of Exile in its combination of personal history, political analysis, and portrait of European intellectual culture: both de Staël and Herzen write from exile about the culture they were forced to leave.
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Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau's autobiography is the founding text of the French Romantic memoir that de Staël inherits in Ten Years of Exile: Rousseau also wrote partly in exile (from France and Geneva) and combined personal history with cultural and political analysis in ways that established the conventions de Staël follows.
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