SOURCE: “History and Story,” in The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 71-93.

In the following excerpt, Hogsett examines de Staël's attempts to insert feminine ways of narration into a masculine-oriented history and literature in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales and Delphine.

Staël published nothing between Passions in 1796 and On Literature in 1800. Simone Balayé speculates that between 1796 and late 1798, when she began the writing of On Literature, she was perhaps working on the second part of the Passions.¹ That does indeed seem likely, especially in the light of her failure to complete “On Current Circumstances …” whose subject matter was closely related to the Passions project. Realizing the impossibility of doing that piece of work, she began to cast about for a potentially more successful project. Her search seems to have taken...