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Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, French writer, 1746-1830

By Gillian Dow, University of Southampton and Chawton House Library

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Few women writers of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s wide appeal in Europe, or met with such a large reading public, both enthusiastic and critical.

Of her 120 published volumes, many key texts were translated into all major European languages, as well as widely read in the original French. Nonetheless, critical reception in Genlis’s own age was frequently hostile to this ‘Mère de l’Eglise’ (Mother of the Church).

Genlis’s own devout Catholicism and her hostility to the philosophes (in particular their perceived atheism), meant that her works quickly fell out of fashion as the nineteenth century progressed, although biographical studies and surveys of the Revolutionary period have never ignored her entirely.

Indeed, interest in the minutiae of