SOURCE: “An Early Dissident: Madame de Staël,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 16, No. 9, May, 1998, pp. 17-22.

In the following essay, Winegarten probes the results of de Staël's exile from France during the Napoleonic regime.

There is a world elsewhere.

—Coriolanus Act III, scene iii

Exile is a terrible fate, a source of bitterness and grief since the time of the ancient Hebrews as they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. In our own tormented era, a great many people have felt what it means to be forcibly cut off, perhaps forever, from their treasured familiar culture. On this theme, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Mme. de Staël (1766-1817), the great forerunner of the modern literary and political dissidents, still has much of value to communicate. For a woman as highly strung and imaginative as she was, exile figured as grimly as death itself...