Madame de Staël, réflexions sur le suicide. Notice sur Lady Jane Grey
Madame de Staël, Reflections on Suicide. A Note on Lady Jane Grey

Summary/Abstract: Lady Jane Grey's life story is an essay published in 1813, in Stockholm, at a time of tense relations between the author and Napoleon Bonaparte: shortly before, in 1810, one of the fundamental Staëlian essays, About Germany, had been banned from France and all printed copies burned. Attributed to the genre of critical and philosophical essays, Reflections on Suicide reveals aspects of the Protestant morality of Madame de Staël, who had been educated in this spirit (her father was a Protestant, a native of the canton of Vaud in Switzerland). The theological position against suicide in this essay is defined differently from that previously expressed in Lettres sur Jean Jacques Rousseau, in Madame de Staël’s youth. Maturity and life experience had taught this woman writer to struggle against and have the courage to oppose herself and tyranny. To the Madame de Staël of the 1813-1815 diplomatic victories in Europe, suicide is an act of cowardice that goes against all Christian precepts. The translation proposed here is an excerpt from the last part of the essay, The Story of Lady Jane Grey's Life, which serves as an illustation of the theological and moral issues presented throughout the three chapters of the essay. It is the first time that this text has been translated into Romanian. I kept the original spelling of the English names, but I corrected an obvious error, overlooked in the text published in 1856, because of its anachronism: Queen Jane Grey of the Tudor Dynasty reigned for nine days in July 1553, not 1653, as it appears in the text chosen for translation.

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