Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin de Genlis

Madame de Genlis was a French writer born in 1746 and dead in 1830, whose career spans the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration. She wrote novels, plays, history and memoirs, but she is remembered above all for her ideas on education. Her importance lies in placing the upbringing of young people at the centre of French-language literature at a time when the subject was constantly debated.

Born into a noble but impoverished family, she received an irregular schooling that she largely completed herself. Very young she married the Comte de Genlis and, thanks to an aunt connected to the House of Orléans, entered the Palais-Royal as governess to the daughters of the Duke of Chartres. In 1781 the duke placed her in charge of his sons' education as well, which led to the dismissal of their tutors and a considerable social scandal.

To support her theories she wrote Théâtre d'éducation, a collection of short comedies for young people, along with Les Annales de la vertu and Adèle et Théodore. Her methods, which included visual aids and walks with a botanist, have been compared with later practices. When the Revolution broke out she was initially sympathetic to it, but the fall of the Girondins drove her into exile in Switzerland, Berlin and Hamburg. After returning to France under Napoleon she received a pension, and in her later years she lived by her pen, producing novels such as Mademoiselle de Clermont and volumes of memoirs.

Her many works, more than eighty according to the sources, cover both prose and verse, and today they are read mainly as material for understanding her era. In Britain her children's books were widely popular, since they adopted several of Rousseau's methods without sharing his principles, and readers such as Jane Austen knew her work well.