Considered the foremost woman intellectual of the Romantic period, Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) exerted a lasting influence on European culture through the example of her remarkable life and the force of her fiction and critical writings. Originally published as "An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Stael", this volume is the first to make a representative sample of her work available to English readers. The selections reflect the wide range of her interests; they include novellas, chapters from her novels, literary and sociological criticism, philosophical reflections, a short play, and an eyewitness account of the French Revolution.