Commemorating Mme de Staël and Jane Austen across Britain and France

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the transnational commemorations and on the literary canonisation of Jane Austen and Madame de Staël in France and Britain. Adopting Dović and Elgason’s model for the study of national literary canons, significant analogies are found in the evolution of the two writers’ reception from 1817 to 2017. Both authors’ works were translated soon after their publication: however, de Staël became a symbol of the anti-Napoleonic fight in Britain thus influencing her early canonisation. Austen, conversely, received few reviews in France and was associated early with an interpretation based on eighteenth-century sentimental novels. In the twentieth century their “sanctification” was supported by literary societies created in the 1930s, and they had a “shrine” in the form of their birthplaces transformed into monuments. This essay analyses the ways in which this canonisation has travelled across Britain and France. Their reception underwent a significant variation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: with the development of women’s studies, the English-speaking academic community adopted de Staël as a canonised writer. The analysis ends by raising the question of the incomplete canonisation of both female writers in France.