Delphine Reading Order

Delphine (1802) by Germaine de Staël is the first of her two major novels and the first great French Romantic novel by a woman — an epistolary novel about Delphine d'Albémar, a wealthy, independent-minded woman in post-Revolutionary France who falls in love with a man who is already committed to another, and whose generosity, intelligence, and independence are punished by a society that requires women to conform to conventional expectations. Published in the same year as Chateaubriand's René and Constant's first version of Adolphe, Delphine announced de Staël's central argument: that the exceptional woman, precisely because she refuses to suppress her intelligence and moral independence, is destroyed by the same social forces that celebrate those qualities in a man. The novel was immediately controversial — Napoleon, whom de Staël opposed politically, called it 'anti-French' and it contributed to his decision to exile her from Paris in 1803. De Staël was the most powerful intellectual figure in France in the early nineteenth century — her salon at Coppet on Lake Geneva was the center of European liberal thought, and she was the first writer to formulate the distinction between 'classical' and 'romantic' literature that would define the debates of the entire century. Delphine is inseparable from that intellectual project: the novel argues for female independence, for Protestant moral seriousness over Catholic social conformity, and for the revolutionary inheritance of individual rights against the Restoration's return to social hierarchy.