Madame de Staël, Reflexions sur le suicide. Notice sur Lady Jane Gray (II)
Madame de Staël, Considerations about suicide (II)

Summary/Abstract: Madame de Staël, Considerations about suicide. Lady Jane Grey's life story is an essay published in 1813, in Stockholm, at a time of the author's tense relations with Napoleon Bonaparte: shortly before, in 1810, one of the fundamental Staëliene essays, About Germany, was banned from France, so all printed copies were burned. Thought to belong to the genre of critical and philosophical essays, Considerations about suicide reveals aspects of the Protestant Christian 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. The maturity and life experience had taught this woman-writer to struggle against and have the courage to oppose tyranny. For Madame de Staël of the 1813-1815 diplomatic victories in Europe, suicide is an act of cowardice and goes against all Christian precepts. The translation we propose is an excerpt from the last part of the essay, 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. As far as this translation goes, it is a premiere for 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 Gray of the Tudor’s dynasty reigned for nine days in July 1553, not 1653, as it appears in the text chosen for translation.

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