Never mind the neighbours

Margaret Anne Doody

• Delphine by Germaine de Staël, translated by Avriel Goldberger
  Northern Illinois, 468 pp, $50.00, September 1995, ISBN 0 85780 200 3

In England during her exile of 1792, Mme de Staël was puzzled as well as offended that Frances Burney, who was then 40, should have felt it necessary to obey her father’s instruction no longer to associate with the adulterous Baronne. Mme de Staël remarked in some puzzlement to Susanna Phillips, Burney’s younger sister: ‘But is a woman under guardianship all her life in your country? It appears to me that your sister is like a girl of 14.’ Frances herself, although she bowed to the need to preserve not only her own but her father’s reputation, was not happy about the restriction: ‘I wish the World would take more care of itself and less of its neighbours. I should have been very safe, I trust, without such flights, & disturbances, & breaches.’