Germaine de Staël is significant for introducing the ideas of German Romanticism to French and English readers of the nineteenth century. Among the New England Transcendentalists she exercised the greatest influence on
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Margaret Fuller,
Theodore Parker, and
George Ripley, mainly through her novel
Corinne (1807)—which portrays a passionate and intellectual heroine who demonstrates the ability to arrive at truth through intuition—and her book
De l’Allemagne (1810)—which, according to William Girard, “was almost a family textbook in America for continental Romanticism.”