Stéphanie-Félicité, Countess of Genlis

Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, Countess of Genlis, was a French writer, educator and harpist whose career spans the Ancien Régime, the Revolution and the Empire. Born in Champcéry, near Autun, in 1746, and dying in Paris in 1830, she is frequently associated with the education of the children of the high nobility and with life in Parisian salons.

From childhood she received a broad training in singing, dance and several instruments, and her performances on the harp attracted attention in Paris before she reached adolescence. At the age of sixteen she married the Comte de Genlis, with whom she had three children. Through her charm, wit and skill she moved with ease in both the salons and the theatre. She later became the mistress of the Duke of Orléans, the future 'Philippe-Égalité' of the Revolutionary era, whose legitimate children she raised alongside her own. Thanks to her gifts as an educator she obtained, despite numerous objections, the post of governess to the family of the Duke of Chartres, for whom she wrote several comedies. Her methods anticipated modern practices, such as fieldwork in botany and the use of projection lanterns.

In 1791 she was forced to leave France and settled in Switzerland and Germany, where she earned her living giving harp lessons and by writing and painting. Napoleon allowed her to return in 1802, and she brought with her Casimir Baeker, an eight-year-old boy presented as a descendant of a noble Berlin family, whom she devoted herself to training as a harp virtuoso. In 1811 her niece Georgette Ducrest married the harpist Bochsa, a marriage that ended in divorce.

Her literary output, abundant and marked by independent thought, includes essays, novels, comedies, poetry, memoirs and a harp method published in Paris in 1802 and 1811. Her pedagogical writings defended novel educational methods and original musical theories, and her method is notable for its resources to facilitate the use of the fifth finger. Her theory of harmonics inspired La Borde's Lettre à Mme de Genlis (1806), and the novelist Wilhelm Raabe mentioned her as an educator in Der Schüdderump (1869).