Mistress To An Age: A Life of Madame de Stael

The book was in fine condition which means it had probably never even been opened since it was printed in 1957. It is a thick book (paperback). The minute I opened it the cover flew off. That was okay with me as it made it easier to turn the pages. After about 150 pages of the book, I found it a bore so that said 'enough already!' and I am now off to another book.

Mistress to an Age is the lively and engrossing biography of Germaine de Stael, the French novelist and philosopher whose name is unfamiliar to most Americans. She was born, 1766, the only child of Jacque Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI. Author Christopher Herold gives a detailed a description of the Family Necker, whose ceaseless self-adulation made them their own best publicists. Necker and his wife were so obsessed with their own immortality that they arranged to be preserved in alcohol and laid to rest in a black marble basin in the family mausoleum. Germaine reputedly hated her mother and openly longed marry her widowed father. No morbid tension in this household. Precociously intellectual and emotionally famished, the young Germaine agreed to marry a dull Swedish diplomat, Eric Magnus Stael von Holstein, and then proceeded to have affairs -- and periodically children -- with the intellectual elite of Europe. Her amours included Talleyrand and Benjamin Constant. In the process, she wrote Delphine and Corinne whose heroines revolted against the strictures of society. Above all, she exalted the "faculty of enthusiasm" in an age characterized by cynicism. Her most enduring work is De L'Allemagne which presaged the rise of modern Germany. Through Madame de Stael, Mistress to an Age tells the story of the The French Revolution (which she supported), the Great Terror (which she abhorred) and the rise of Napoleon, who was to become the chief antagonist of her later years. A National Book Award winner.