A tempest in petticoats

摘要

Just reading about the life of Germaine Necker, or Madame de Staeel as she later became, is an exhausting business. She talked, wrote novels, plays and political treatises, travelled widely and had affairs enough for two or three lifetimes. Her social life often sounds like what might happen if a whole shelf of Penguin Classics grew arms and legs and held a cocktail party: Goethe and Schiller were invited in Germany, Byron and Coleridge in England. But she was also a determined political intriguer at an exceptionally interesting time, a player and observer in a world that was generally closed to women.