Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël

Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Necker, the finance minister whose dismissal helped trigger the French Revolution, and she spent her life at the center of everything: the Paris salons where the Revolution was argued into being, the Terror she fled, the Napoleonic Europe that exiled her, and the romantic movement she helped invent. J. Christopher Herold's biography earns its title, Mistress to an Age, by treating her life as the story of the era itself. She wrote novels and the pioneering study On Germany, which introduced German romanticism to France and which Napoleon's police pulped; she conducted tempestuous affairs with Benjamin Constant and half the interesting men in Europe; and above all she talked, brilliantly and unstoppably, until Napoleon concluded that her salon was a headquarters of opposition and banished her from Paris. The duel between the emperor and the woman he could not silence is the spine of the book, and Herold, who wrote extensively on the Napoleonic era, gives both combatants their due. His tone is the book's signature: witty, worldly, affectionately exasperated with a heroine who was vain, needy, generous, and heroic all at once, and the result reads like the best conversation about the best gossip of a great age, grounded in real scholarship. Herold, a Columbia graduate fluent in six languages who served in Army intelligence during the war and became editor in chief of Stanford University Press, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1959 for it, and the book remains the liveliest introduction in English to one of history's most remarkable women.