Corinne

An improvising poet crowned at the Capitol loves an English peer who cannot marry a woman the world admires, and the two countries in the book are as much characters as the lovers. Madame de Staël published Corinne in 1807 while exiled by Napoleon, who understood exactly what it was arguing. It made Italy fashionable for a generation of northern travellers. Fifty-six plates of Venetian capricci and harbour views by Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, the painted Italy that Madame de Staël's heroine and her northern readers carried in their minds.