Corinne ou l'Italie Reading Order

Corinne ou l'Italie (1807) by Germaine de Staël is the most important French novel about a female genius — the story of Corinne, a famous poet and improvvisatrice who crowns herself at the Capitol in Rome, and her love for the Scottish lord Oswald Nelvil, who cannot ultimately choose her over the demands of English respectability and his family's honor. The novel is simultaneously a meditation on Italy (its art, antiquities, landscape, and culture, described in long digressive passages that constitute the first great European travel narrative disguised as a novel), a feminist philosophical argument (genius in a woman is not incompatible with love but is rendered incompatible by society), and a sentimental tragedy (Corinne destroys herself after Oswald chooses her conventional half-sister Lucile). Staël was the daughter of the financier Necker, the most famous intellectual woman in Europe, and Corinne was understood by contemporaries as a self-portrait. The novel's influence was extraordinary: it created the archetype of the passionate artistic woman destroyed by an impossible love that became the dominant female figure in French Romanticism, and it launched the Italian travel narrative as a French literary genre. Stendhal, Byron (who met Staël), Balzac, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Margaret Fuller all responded directly to it.