Biography: 'She was a most agreeable woman," said the Duke of Wellington of Madame de Staël, "as long as you could keep her light and away from politics. She was always trying to come to matters of state." But in truth one of the most interesting things about Madame de Staël is her passion for matters of state.
And one of the saddest is that in her time this passion had so little outlet if you were a woman. Good but not righteous, idealistic but pragmatic, progressive but moderate, she could have been a a great stateswoman. As it was, all that passion had to be mediated through men or her writing. But what men.
Talleyrand, Bonaparte, Bernadotte, Tsar Alexander I, sundry kings of Europe . . . she influenced them all. Not to speak of her fellow-writers - Goethe, Gibbon, Schiller, Byron. Germaine de Staël's address-book would have read like a contemporary roll-call of the great, if not always the good.
If this gives an impression that she was pompous or tedious, she wasn't. Her wit and conversation inevitably brought her critics onside once they met her.
Her books brought her fame across Europe and the highest praise from Byron and Goethe, who translated her novels into German. Her one misfortune was that, though her eyes were dark and splendid, she was not beautiful. But that didn't stop men falling for her. She was deeply amorous and always had an affair, and sometimes two or three, on the go.
Her great love, however, was her father. He was Jacques Necker, a relatively humble Genevan Lutheran who made his fortune in banking and rose to become Louis XVI's director of finance and a public hero as France slid towards Revolution. Necker's career was as mercurial as the times. He was in and out of favour, exiled and restored, but he was always considered honest and progressive. His nature was loving and constant - he adored his starchy and neurotic wife just as he adored his daughter. So much so that mother and daughter, temperamentally at odds anyway, were jealous of each other - Germaine envied her mother for having won and kept such a great man. The man she wanted to marry was her father, she wrote frankly before her arranged marriage at the age of 20 to the foppish Eric de Staël, Swedish Ambassador to the Court.
It was not a good match. De Staël, against her expectations, fell under her spell and wanted her attentions as well as her dowry. Necker paid his gambling debts and kept him in valets and horses and Madame de Staël kept her independence.
But this didn't prevent her revelling in her role as ambassadress. She was blessed with a kind of childish confidence. Soon she was writing, uninvited, bright and informative missives to the King of Sweden about life in Paris, "colour" pieces to supplement her husband's bulletins, which she was believed to be writing in any case.
Of course since childhood she was no stranger to the highest society. Through her father she was an habitué of Versailles. And her mother had a salon on Fridays where M. Necker hardly spoke and Germaine conversed with Voltaire, Diderot and the Abbé Raynal. With this kind of early acquaintance, it's not surprising that she welcomed the Revolution. Her enthusiasm for reform earned her the dislike of Marie Antoinette - unfortunate because when Mme de Staël formulated a not unpromising plan by which the Queen might be rescued from the Tuileries and her fate Marie Antoinette would have nothing to do with it.
Mme de Staël's politics never got in the way of her personal sympathies. As the guillotine was chopping away at the ancien régime she succeeded in getting a great number of her aristocratic friends safely to England where Necker money set them up in the community based around Juniper Hall. Among them was her lover, the Duc de Narbonne, the father of her first two, ostensibly de Staël, children. Narbonne disappointed her, as her lovers generally did in the end..
Natural, spontaneous, she would throw herself on the mercies of the men she loved, writing importunate letters and threatening suicide. Benjamin Constant, the father of her daughter Albertine, remained more or less constant however.
Her relationship with this soulmate lasted 15 years. When finally Constant married a more peacable and conventional woman he was miserable.
In Napoleon, Madame de Staël initially saw genius and perhaps potential as the great man she was always seeking. But he was impervious. He saw her as ugly, unwomanly and meddlesome. Napoleon believed women should be obedient and subservient and that Madame de Staël should have given him several favourable mentions in her book, De la Littérature. But he came to see in her a formidable adversary. During a bloody campaign in Prussia in 1808 no fewer than 10 of the letters he wrote to his police chief in Paris were on the subject of Madame de Staël. When she was about to publish De l'Allemagne, in which she praises countries other than France, he had the book pulped.
From then on her life was conditioned by Napoleon's enmity. Exiled but denied access to England, she set off on the scenic route via Russia. Accompanied by her lover, John Rocca, 20 years her junior, she advanced on Moscow a little ahead of Napoleon's grande armée. Unlike his, her invasion was characteristically triumphant.
Perhaps the one fault with this erudite and marvellously readable life by Maria Fairweather is that it does not quite convey the complexity of Madame de Staël.
After all, as a person as much as a writer, she was both a child of the Enlightenment and one of the first Romantics, melancholy and troubled no less than intellectual and rational. But then again she was a simple and noble soul.
"I have always been the same; lively and sad," she said to Chateaubriand on her deathbed. "I have loved God, my father and liberty."
Madame de Staël: A Biography by Maria Fairweather Constable & Robinson, 522pp. £25
Anne Haverty is a novelist