ABSTRACT
Madame de Stael's first published work, which appeared just before the Revolution in 1788, was a laudatory study of the career of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's ideas about women exerted a tremendous influence on French society and political life throughout Stael's lifetime, and served to underpin the ideological constraints on women's self-conceptions, and ultimately the legal constraints on their political and civil rights. Stael's portrayal of Lady Edgermond shows her to be clear-eyed about the possible effects of self-repression in women, and thus undercuts the rather sentimental view of English domestic life found in Rousseau's works and in some of her own. Byron was anxious to distance himself from Rousseau for reasons which had everything to do with what he saw as conceptions of love typical of women. For Byron, the emotional self-dramatization fostered by Stael's novel had more dangerous effects, in that it heightened passion while at the same time deluding the sufferer about its basis in physical attraction.
