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The Woman Who Never Stopped TalkingThe secret of Madame de Stael's success.

By Stacy SchiffUpdated Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, at 7:18 AM ET

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It did not take her long to pick up her pen, thereafter lodged (attested Byron) at all times behind her ear; on the page she—and her political acuity—captivated Europe. Her first great work addressed women's difficulty reconciling love and work, for which the winning formula has yet to be revealed. This was new terrain, repeatedly trod by de Stael, who recognized in her sex a moral superiority and a civilizing presence. She begged them to continue to assert themselves: "It is essential to the happiness of society for women to develop their spirit and their rational powers." The novels, too, are polemics on women's rights. Her Corinne certainly qualifies as the first independent literary heroine; as Gray points out, she is not only financially, socially, and romantically independent but celebrated for her own accomplishments to boot. The novel would influence, among others, Mary Godwin, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who confessed to "intense sympathy" for its heroine.

More than anything it was her assault on imperial politics that put Madame de Stael on the map; she was the bane of Napoleon's existence. He was not pleased to read that "[l]iberality is nothing other than morality in government" and was no happier to be compared on the page to Attila the Hun. For her published offenses he exiled her from Paris so many times I lost count. On no occasion does he seem to have made it through more than a few pages of Madame de Stael's works. More to the point, she was a dangerous woman with influential friends and a dedicated audience.

De Stael's politics were liberal, also at all times wildly inconsistent. She was a contrarian; Gray notes that she tended to side with the opposition. She wrote against slavery, for Marie Antoinette. When she was not writing she was politicking. She knew everyone worth knowing and appears never to have met an idea, or an intrigue, that left her cold. She colluded with Czar Alexander, who hoped she might entice the Swedes to join in an anti-Napoleon coalition—one that envisioned a Swede on the throne of France. In thanks part to Napoleon, she roamed the Continent; she was responsible for a great deal of cultural cross-pollination, introducing German philosophy and literature to England, the history of Italy to France.

As a woman, she comes off as a mix of self-regard, self-delusion, and raw, overpowering intellect. Her physical charms were less defined, by no means set off to advantage by her wardrobe. She went in for feathered turbans and vibrantly colored décolletés. You know the type; if you grew up in a small town, she taught modern dance. She was speechless on only one recorded occasion, an early meeting with First Consul Bonaparte. "No doubt," he ventured, speaking directly to her formidable bosom, "you have nursed your children yourself?"

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As she has proved before, Gray excels at the short form, not exactly made for Madame de Stael. That Gray is able to rein her in is a marvel; that she has compressed her exuberance and corpulence to 256 pages a miracle. Then there are the convoluted politics of the time: At one point Gray neatly extracts de Stael's major ideas, freely admitting her subject's ineptitudes and inconsistencies without bludgeoning her with either. She lets this eminently quotable woman speak for herself, administering a full dose of her intoxicating conversation. What was exile? De Stael, who should know, defined it as "a tomb in which you can get mail."

Gray is fortunate in that the genius was perhaps more in the life than in the literature, always a blessing for the biographer. Madame de Stael endures primarily as an activist, a champion of women's rights, a brilliant nonconformist. She positioned herself at the nexus of talent and society and proceeded to defy the rules of both. To appreciate the immensity of her achievement one has only to remember that this irrepressible force of nature, she who had every gift she bestowed on Corinne—education, independence, a private life, and a public career—was nearly an exact contemporary of Jane Austen.

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Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.
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