ABSTRACT

Critic after critic has censured Madame de Staël for setting her novel, Delphine of 1802, in the midst of the Revolution for some thirty months between 1790 and 1792. Why not situate it in another period? After all, the Revolution plays a minor role in the book. It may even detract from the apparent subject of the novel, the tormented love affair between Delphine and Léonce.1 Although the novel has of late been resurrected by Madelyn Gutwirth and other critics as a feminist masterpiece, they have not neglected its flaws. Not only is it written as an epistolary novel, a form that today seems over-weighted with long, dull passages, but the dialogue is wooden and the style of the letters too uniform, sharing a commitment to sententious vehemence, whoever the putative author. Moving from one emotional crisis to another, the all too similar plaints become tiring. Léonce and Delphine, M. de Valorbe, M. de Serbellane and Mme d’Ervins, Mme de Vernon, Matilde de Mondoville, to cite but the most salient, all suffer, and it becomes difficult to distinguish one pain from another. Still, despite what today seem serious flaws, Delphine was very successful with the reading public. It was published simultaneously in both Geneva and Paris, and it went through several editions and many republications before it eventually lost favor and was forgotten. One wonders nonetheless why it was a success?