ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley’s intellectual and literary career is eloquent testimony to the unique power of influence Germaine de Staël’s writings held over the future development of nineteenth-century women’s literature. Indeed, Staël’s influence for Shelley as a literary ancestor is second only to that of her biological parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. From the incorporation of On Germany’s discussions of German scientific and illuminist communities into her first novel Frankenstein (1818) to her biography of Staël written in 1839 for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France [sic], Shelley’s works give witness to Staël’s vital presence in the writings of her literary descendants. As Shelley herself asserted in her intellectual biography of Staël, no other writer of her epoch “left such luminous ideas on her route.” 1
