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This chapter considers the links between women and genius in the figure of Mme De Staël's Corinne (from her 1807 of the same name). At the time of its publication women there seemed to be no place for women in genius or for genius in women. At the same time, however, the novel, which was traditionally associated with a female readership, was gaining status as a literary genre. Mme de Staël, as one of the rare women commentators on genius, curiously made no explicit attempt to counter the arguments of those who denied genius to her sex and even echoed many of their assumptions. Yet she would eventually come to portray the heroine of her second novel, Corinne, as an unambiguous incarnation of female genius.

This chapter turns to Julia Kristeva's discussion of female genius. It presents Kristeva's three biographical studies of Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), and Colette (2002), published under the collective title Le Génie feminine. Her perspective is predominantly psychoanalytic as she approaches her subject with a certain boldness as she treats female genius as a given rather than defensively pleading the cause. Hence, collectively, the trilogy offers a psychoanalytically grounded account of gender and femininity as part of its reflection on genius. Genius takes a new, explicitly gendered form here and it does so thanks to the mix of literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis that is characteristic of the later years of “French theory.”

This chapter introduces Kristeva's recent writings on the female genius, focusing on her work on Hannah Arendt and on the development of Arendtian themes in Kristeva's ideas. So far, this aspect of Kristeva's œuvre has not received much coverage in the critical commentary; hence, this chapter aims to provide a more detailed examination and discussion of Kristeva's work on Arendt, and seeks to initiate a feminist interpretation of these texts. It begins by attending to an exposition and assessment of Kristeva's Romantic heritage and its impact on the concept of (female) genius; it then proceeds to discuss her engagement with Arendtian conceptions of narrative, life and rebirth, before considering the question of political bonds and its implications for feminist thought. The chapter concludes with some tentative thoughts on a recent development in Kristeva's writings: namely, her engagement with the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Building upon Kristeva's insistence on the singularity and plurality of life, it will be suggested that her engagement with Arendt's ideas establishes the framework of a political philosophy that could, potentially, come to shape a feminist appropriation of Kristeva's work.

This chapter focuses on novels written by women in the United States from 1790 to 1870, with special reference to the issues of female genius, assertiveness, and “self-dependence” that challenge the conventions of female domesticity. It explores how female novelists such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Louisa May Alcott worked to highlight women’s educational and political rights and to redefine their role in U.S. life. It also considers the influence of women writers on romantic thought before concluding with an analysis of a number of women’s novels such as Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807), Alcott’s Little Women (1868–1869), Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855), Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854).

Looking back over two decades, the author recalls her appropriation of theoretical tools from the French poststructuralist philosopher, Julia Kristeva: first to read women and the feminine-identified flesh back into biblical texts and to resist older readings that viewed these presences as inferior agents or contaminants. Secondly Kristeva’s idea of female genius gives theoretical support to the case that women continually challenge orthodox biblical readings in inauspicious male-normative circumstances by reading the Bible for themselves. Illustrating the concept of female genius, the chapter returns to Jane Leade, a seventeenth-century visionary. She exemplifies the capacity of women to bring something singular and authentic—such as her descriptions of the biblical figure of Wisdom as female and her dream-visions of bodily restorations—to their readings of the Bible. The author continues to pose the question as to whether or not women (and other genders) can continue to profit from reading the Bible.