Born Anne Louise Germaine Necker in Paris, France, she was the daughter of the prominent Swiss statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France, and Suzanne Curchod. She was raised in an academic environment as a result of the intellectual salon her mother hosted in her home. After her marriage to the Baron de l-Holstein, the Swedish ambassador, Anne Louise established her own salon as a center for leading intellectuals.
She embarked on a writing career under the name Madame de Sta l that, after she published a book praising German culture, caused Napoleon Bonaparte to ban her from Paris. She moved to Coppet near Lake Geneva, where she established a new salon and continued to write.
In De la littérature considérée das ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) she stated that "an artist must be of his own time" - the literary text is the expression of the moral and historical reality (der zeitgeist) of the nation in which it is conceived.
Mme de Staël advocated the idea, which became a cliché, that the classical was descended from the Pagan Roman past, dominant in southern Europe, and the romantic from the knightly and Christian world of the North.
Correspondence of Mme de Staël and P.S. du Pont de Nemours, 1968
AnneLouiseGermainede Staël (April 22, 1766 – July 14, 1817) was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad who determined literary tastes of Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Mathieu de Montmorency and Mme Recamier were exiled for the crime of seeing her; and she at last began to think of doing what she ought to have done years before and withdrawing herself entirely from Napoleon's sphere.
She published De l'Allemagne in the autumn, was saddened by the death of her second son Albert, who had entered the Swedish army and fell in a duel brought on by gambling, undertook her Considerations sur la revolution francaise, and when Louis XVIII had been restored returned to Paris.
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