Chapter 10 reviews Staël’s impact on French nineteenth-century theater, from her critical discussions in treatises like De l’Allemagne, to which Romantic drama theory owes profound debts, to her own performances in Geneva and across Europe, to her substantial dramatic output, from Voltairean verse tragedies to vaudevilles and avant-garde drames, source for at least two Romantic authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann. Staël’s complex relationship to German Romanticism, from Hoffmann to Tieck and the Schlegels, gains from this review.

Chapter 8 reviews Staël’s Manuscrits de M. Necker. At Staël’s death, her partner Constant called this memoir of her father his favorite Staël text; and since Necker was France’s chief minister when the Bastille fell, the memoir seems ripe for study. Startling, then, that a recent 2,700-item survey of Staël criticism lists one single review, from 1805, while in 2004, Cahier staëlien 55, which is dedicated to Necker, contains no real mention of his daughter’s text. This chapter addresses this blind spot, tackling three questions: where the text fits in our knowledge of Staël and Necker; what pressures are strong enough to render a major text like this invisible; and what our blindness has cost us.

Chapter 16 concerns national, public credit, with two axes. First, it argues that Staël’s theory of credit is richer than that of the tyrants, from Convention to Empire, who exiled the woman they owed two million francs. She calls such tyranny myopic, like building an economy on theft; modern states require public credit. Second, later history again denied Staël credit, exiling her from their all-male Revolution canon by seeing women’s chatter where her dialectic stood. This dialectic is retraced throughout Staël’s works but primarily in her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française.