Richard Holmes schrieb für die New York Review of Books ein gut zu lesendes Portrait über Madame de Staël. Anlass sind eine Reihe von Neuerscheinungen:

She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel— Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as “ vulgaire.“ She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, „Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.“ And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. […]