Delphine. In Six Volumes. Vo. I [-VI]

Bookseller Notes

De Stal's first novel, which explores the freedom of women in aristocratic society (first published in Geneva in 1802, with a clutch of English editions swiftly following). 'Madame de Vernon is one of the most successful of de Stal's characters, and the most complex. In her magnificent and slightly ironic self-defence, at her partly repentant end, Mme de Vernon accuses her society and its treatment of women, both within the paternal family and in arranged marriages, of teaching her the dissimulation she has made the standard of her existence. [...] Here is one of the pleasures of the novel its analytic language, its play of description and its witty observation.' Not only a success in its own right, the novel influenced Fanny Burney and Jane Austen: Burney's Camilla and Delphine ask similar questions, and the 'issues raised from the very beginning of Delphine the conflict between feeling and worldly wisdom, between conformity to things as they are and an individualism that might challenge those things are the issues that dominate Sense and Sensibility [...] Austen's darkest, most uncomfortable novel' (Margaret Anne Doody, 'Never mind the Neighbours' LRB (Vol. 18 No. 7) 4 April 1996). The novel displeased Napoleon, who exiled the author.