Fame, particularly for women, is a strange and unpredictable thing. For centuries, most of the great things done by women, their outstanding talents and amazing discoveries, have been forgotten and later reinvented by men, or claimed from the start by men – and often there’s little chance of this being corrected. Yet sometimes, a story is so outstanding, so surprising, so amazing, that it’s survived to be revived and propagated in an age that seeks out these women’s deeds.

Who would have predicted that Mary Anning, a working-class woman, who spent much of her life only a few pounds from the workhouse, in an obscure little English coastal town, would today be one of the most famous women of the 19th century?

An actress portraying her regularly parades around the Natural History Museum, many of her great fossil discoveries are properly labelled with her details, and now, Tracy Chevalier, well known for her Girl with a Pearl Earring (although personally I prefer The Lady and the Unicorn) has made her the subject of her latest book, Remarkable Creatures.

Like those books, this isn’t great literature, but very good reading – built around finely woven characterisation and dialogue that superbly exercises that cardinal novelist’s rule: show don’t tell.

As in all of her other books, Chevalier has clearly done her research on Anning, and her other central character, Elizabeth Philpott, a middle-class if impoverished spinster who helped Anning, while doing her own fine and important work on fossil fishes. She’s also clearly absorbed the social mores of this stiff, superstitious, class-obsessed age, and the way it was deeply disturbed by the unmistakable message that emerged as the fossil record in the cliff of the coast around Lyme Regis started to be unearthed.

(N.B. This book has not yet been released in the US, but is available in the UK.)

If the structure of their relationship – its great split engendered by what seems like an unlikely obsession with a clearly unsuitable, unlikely man – seems a little forced and artificial, well that’s the price one pays for popularising Anning’s story. (And it has to be said that for all her virtues, Chevaliers always have the whiff of the writing class about them.)

Nevertheless, if you know Anning, you should read this book – it might not teach you anything new, but it will enjoyably put flesh on the bones of her story. If you don’t know Anning, read it for the entertainment value, but also because you’ll then know about a great woman of history, and have acquired the knowledge in an entirely pleasurable manner.

Napoleon feared her, the crown heads of Europe courted her, as did the intellectual elite, she was much quoted in her own time and ours, yet Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein – generally known as Madame de Staël, was a figure who had almost disappeared into the mists of history.

How astonishing it is, that the woman of whom the French memoir writer Madame de Chastenay wrote, there were three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: “England, Russia, and Madame de Staël,” could have suffered such a fate. And Vienna, a city heavily marked by its opposition to Napoleon, would, despite the fact that she stayed there for only five months, for years after refer to 1808 as the year of Madame de Stael’s visit.

I’ve been obliquely bumping into her during my excursions through women’s history for years, but it was only when reading about her friendship with Juliette Récamier , and learning that she’s been the subject of no less than five recent books, led me to finally determine to read more.

I’d love to read all five books, but since that isn’t going to happen, I chose Angelica Goodden The Dangerous Exile, in part because it seemed to focus rather less on the romantic side of de Staël’s life, and if there’s one aspect of her I find rather repulsive, it’s her rather histrionically conducted love life.

That, of course, got her into trouble in her own time – having children to men not your spouse being rather frowned upon. Fanny Burney wrote in 1813, about her dropping of de Stael in 1793: “I had found her so charming that I fought the hardest battle I dared fight against almost ALL my best connections… She is now received by all mankind – but that indeed, she always was — all womankind, I should say with distinction and pleasure.”

That was when de Staël was in exile in England, yet for Goodden, she is always more or less in exile – fighting to be allowed to be the person she wants to be, when she’s a woman. Behind her exile the author identifies the question: “how is it possible to be politically aware, politically active and yet a woman?”

And she’s also fighting to make society correspond more closely to what she sees as positive, womanly virtues. So de Staël in the second preface to La Nouvelle Heloise, defends reading fiction as a moral activity, “believing that the novel’s presentation of intimacy fosters a sense of values that beg to be preserved in a world otherwise enslaved to the vulgar thrust of glory-seeking and self-interest”.

Mary Berry describes dining at Stael’s house in Paris with among others Recamier. The salon society of Paris, though more serious than before the Revolution, still impressed visitors as cultured and more stylish and sophisticated than London’s

“Napoleon’s empire, and with it the exclusive rule of men, had not yet begun. In the salons people still listened to music and conversed; they watched plays and talked about literature and art rather than money and other concerns of a world governed by self-interest.”

Goodden also makes it clear how the European intellectual elite valued her. Goethe was drawn to her: “There is something charming about her presence, both in the spiritual and in the physical sense, and she seemed not displeased when one showed one’s impressionability in the later respect too. How often she tried to unite sociability, well-meaningless, inclination and passion! Indeed, she once said, ‘I have never trusted a man who hadn’t once been in love with me.'”

The Queen of Prussia, Luise von Mecklemburg-Strelitz, was a passionate opponent of the French Revolution and a declared enemy of Napoleon – also considered “as beautiful as Recamier”. It was a mutual charming between visitor and queen, although it is to de Staël’s credit that she found the Queen’s reign utterly deadened by Prussian militarism. She wrote to Goethe “whatever liveliness and youth might have existed my perceptions are is virtually suffocated here”.

Goodden says her Corinne and earlier heroines “seem to epitomize the impotence of women in early 19th-century Europe, unwisely loving, caring too much, destroyed by the grief that follows disappointment, and perfectly embodying the futility of the only kind of reason credited to them, that of being able to analyse their feelings but not uproot them”.

Yet while this is often expressed in romantic terms, Goodden sees the disappointment as also clearly political. She sees this particularly in de Stael’s novel Corrinne – “the title character has broken the bounds of convention as a woman and an artist, and the art is an expression of the political state that may come to prevail in her country”. There’s implicit criticism of France here, for, as de Stael had written in De La Litterature: “As soon as a woman is marked out as a distinguished person, the general public is prejudiced against her. The crowd only ever judges according to certain common rules that can he adhered to without risk.”

Corinne was twice translated in English in the year of its publication. George Eliot admired it and Elizabeth Barrett, born the year before it appeared declared it to be “an immortal book”. Maria Edgeworth describes both male and female members of her family being consumed with grief at the unfolding of the story, during a reading that continued into 2am

The power of her pen and her tongue – and the way it was feared by Napoleon, was demonstrated in 1810. Mathieu de Montmorency spent a few days with her at her unhappy refuge at Coppet and was immediately exiled by Napoleon, her link being given as the absolute cause. Recamier also suffered the same fate. Goodden writes: “To be known to Staël was immediately to become persona non grata, however, little political influence one possessed.”

Soon after the birth of a child, in 1812 she evaded Napoleon’s spies and embarked on a two-year trip to Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Gailicia, Russia, Sweden and England. She would use her own persecution by Napoleon as an example to warn against his threat to Eirope.
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“Women’s political thought”: is there such a thing? Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green have no doubt that there is, at least in the European tradition. Scanning from 1400 to 1700, the foundational period for our modern political landscape, they look at a diverse range of women, from the obvious, Christine de Pizan, Margaret Cavendish, Marie le Jars de Gournay, to women you’d not normally think of as political theorists, from Queen Elizabeth I of England to Mary Astell.

Their thesis, in A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700, is that these women first of all share a consciousness of gender: “these women defend their capacity for political virtue, they argue for women’s prudence, they defend female monarchs, and they call for female liberty of conscience against the tyranny of men”. Yet, the authors have to admit their story isn’t all good news: “many are intolerant and conservative, critical of those who bring about social disorder for the sake of religious freedom and they are committed to individual virtue and passive obedience to authority”.

They divided the period, and their writers, into two broad groups: those who celebrate heroic and even actively fighting women, such as Joan of Arc, exceptional examples of their sex which nevertheless demonstrate what women are capable of. The authors broadly locate this approach in the earlier period, and identify a rival, and largely supplanting, more “feminine” model of female excellence, including in political life, dating from around the middle of the 17th century.

The authors see this as driven particularly by Madeleine de Scudery, who “was enormously influential in developing a form of feminism that became so acceptable as to cease to be recognised as feminist. Indeed, it is arguable that Rousseau’s romantic conception of the place of love in society, and his representation of feminine difference, were influenced by Scudery, whose novels he read with his father at a very young age”.

As the authors point out, there are curious parallels here with the 20th century “turn from feminisms of equality to feminisms of difference”. They agree with Joan DeJean that women in this different way maintained political engagement, but differ from her in rejecting any claim that there was anything radical or democratic about their politics. (DeJean rejects Habermas’s claim that “the public sphere” began in the English coffee house, locating its origins instead in late 17th-century France during the “battle between ancients and moderns”.)

This reflects the explanation that Broad and Green give, which is representative of the book’s approach: while this is clearly a solidly academic monograph, it is also perfectly accessible to a general reader, and it gives a delightful introduction to many interesting women of the period. It’s a pity then that it’s only available in academic hardbook, at prohibitive library prices.

Every woman (and man) should have been taught about Christine de Pizan and her Book of the City of Ladies — clearly an outstanding thinker of the ages — at school. Those with a closer interest in European history should see how her influence continued after her death, particularly on women rulers. As Board and Green chart, her books were prominent in the libraries of royal and powerful aristocratic women, including Anne de Beaujeu, Anne of Brittany and Louise of Savoy, while they argue that Elizabeth I was almost certainly exposed to the books, and certainly to a set of tapestries depicting the City of Ladies, reported in an inventory of the possessions of the 14-year-old Elizabeth.

The authors are not, however, concerned only with royalty and aristocracy. There are also chapters on the women of the English civil war era (including Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Poole), Quaker women (Priscilla Cotton, Mary Cole and Margaret Fell), and the women of the Glorious Revolution (Elinor James – nee Banckes and Anne Docwra – nee Waldegrave).

Bringing all of this together, the authors conclude that the traditional account of the history of men’s political ideas as a progress towards liberalism, with feminism depicted as an offshoot of this, is profoundly defective. “Long before Descartes, Christine grounded her defence of women on her own independent reason and experience, and her influence on women is significant up until the 16th century. Seventeenth-century women’s political thought is more often opposed to Machiavelli and Hobbes, rather than built on them. Marie le Jars de Gournay defends women’s equality with men, but is influenced by Montaigne, and not by Descartes. Quaker women are egalitarian but ground this on biblical injunctions, not modern political texts. Madeleine de Scudery explores models of egalitarian love and friendship between the sexes, independently of ideas about the social contract, and while 17th-century English women do engage with Locke, this engagement is as often critical as it is complimentary.”

Furthermore, the authors say, there’s a logical, continuous tradition here: “Mary Astell had read at least some of the works of Madeleine de Scudery; Scudery herself had earlier attempted to initiate a correspondence with Anna Maria van Schurman, as well as referring to Maurgerite de Navarre, and Madeleine and Catherine des Roches. Anna Maria van Schurman corresponded with Marie le Jars de Gournay and Elisabeth of Bohemia, and she was acquainted with Christina of Sweden. Schurman had also read Lucrezia Marinella, who acknowledged Moderata Fonte and earlier learned women such as Cassandra Fedele and Isotta Nogarola. Both Fonte and Marinella influenced Arcangela Tarabotti, whose ideas are sufficiently similar to those of Gabrielle Suchon to make one suspect some influence.”

As the authors conclude, their work here is preliminary. A vast amount more research needs to be done into this almost buried and forgotten tradition. And then, maybe one day, it will take its proper place as a respected, central part of our history.

And while I’m around these fields I should also point to the excellent early modern history carnival..