This paper takes as its starting point the discrepancy between the description of England by the heroine in Corinne ou l'Italie (1807) and, on the other hand, the presentation of the country as a political model in the Considérations sur la Révolution française, pondering the possibility of assessing gender in fiction or in history at the turn of the nineteenth century. The paper then addresses various options in the field of fiction itself by comparing the author of Corinne with Austen, the great English novelist of Staël's generation.