THE

MODERN ATHENIANS

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

IN THE JEFFREY YEARS, 1802-1829

Tag Archives: Madame de Staël

Jacques Necker (1732-1804)

banker, diplomat, and finance minister to Louis XVI.

BORN in Geneva, Necker was sent to Paris to work in a bank until starting his own – Thellusson et Necker – which would become famous, and Necker would amass wealth through grain speculation and loans to the treasury. In 1764, Necker married Suzanne Curchod de Nasse. Their daughter, Anne Louise Germaine, would become the noted author, Madame de Staël.

Necker entered public life as a director of the French East India Company, resigning his share in the bank to take up office at his wife’s urging. In 1776 he was appointed Director-General of Finance, instigating a number of popular reforms. At loggerheads with Louis XVI over the need for tax reform to cover the nation’s ballooning debt, Necker was dismissed after publishing the first account of the royal finances, Compte rendu au roi (1781).

In 1788, the dire state of public finances led to his re-appointment. Ratifying the Dauphiné assembly, Necker hastened the summoning of the Estates General and doubled the size of the Third Estate. His subsequent dismissal sparked public outrage, and helped precipitate the storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789). Bowing to public pressure, and at Jean Joseph Mounier’s insistence, Louis XVI recalled Necker, who was paraded through Paris in triumph. Ill-suited to his role as statesman, however, Necker would not co-operate with Lafayette and Mirabeau and mismanaged crucial economic measures. In 1790 he resigned in disgrace, living in retirement near Geneva until his death in 1804.

If the Edinburgh took issue in its second number with the republican vision for France Necker outlined in Last Views [Dernières Vues de Politique et de Finance (1802)], his ‘pacific and impartial disposition’ was welcomed (ER 1:395).

William Christie, University of Sydney

 

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

, novelist.

JANE AUSTEN, the daughter of an English clergyman, has become perhaps the best-known novelist of her generation, even though she was overshadowed at the time by contemporaries such as Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Madame de Staël. While she began writing in childhood and wrote preliminary drafts of two of her mature novels during the 1790s, it was not until 1811, with the publication of Sense and Sensibility, that Austen launched her publishing career. She followed that with Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, her first and last completed novels, appeared posthumously in 1818. Austen did achieve modest literary success before her death:  the Prince Regent admired her work highly enough to invite her to dedicate Emma to him (which she did somewhat reluctantly), and Scott praised Austen’s fiction both publicly in The Quarterly Review and privately in his journal. Scott’s article for The Quarterly was, however, the only significant review that Austen received during her lifetime; she was not one of the very select few women novelists to be reviewed by The Edinburgh, though Jeffrey was reportedly ‘kept up three nights’ by Emma (1815). Her reputation began to climb in the 1820s and 1830s and ‘the novels of Miss Austin’ received favourable mention in an article Jeffrey wrote on Felicia Hemans in 1829 (ER 50:33). When in 1846 Jeffrey published his Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, he cited Austen as an ‘intrinsically original’ writer who had contributed to rescuing the novel from the ‘despicable’ and ‘degraded’ state to which he saw the genre as having sunk by the opening years of the nineteenth century (Jeffrey Contributions 3: 2).

PP