Ach, wie wünschte ich mir Geld genug, um eine Professur zu stiften: Sophie von La Roche im literarischen und kulturpolitischen Feld von Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit (review)

This collection of essays, the result of a 2007 Symposium at the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Sophie von La Roche’s death, highlights different aspects of La Roche’s wide-ranging literary work and correspondence, thus solidifying her status as one of the foremost transmitters of cultural knowledge during the eighteenth century. It was the editors’ wish that the contributions expand the narrow critical focus on La Roche’s famous first novel Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, a wish that has certainly been fulfilled by this diverse group of articles.

One group of essays provides new insights regarding a number of La Roche’s numerous epistolary friendships, while another group seeks to outline new interpretive approaches to her later literary output. Among the relationships (and correspondences) examined are those La Roche had with Goethe, the poet Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel, author and critic Johann Heinrich Merck, Countess Elisabeth zu Solms-Laubach, and Johann Friedrich Christian Petersen, an educator employed at the Hessen-Darmstadt court, as well as a number of his male siblings.

Barbara-Becker Cantarino provides an informative and entertaining overview of La Roche’s sometimes less than cordial relationship with Goethe, who for most of their acquaintance seems to have been more interested in people in her familial circle than in La Roche herself. Becker-Cantarino also points out his swift loss of interest in her as a friend and correspondent after her husband’s dismissal from public office.

Among the essays that highlight hitherto neglected aspects of La Roche’s oeuvre are Monika Nenon’s article, which investigates how in her later years La Roche adopted a stoic view of life and happiness that emphasized self-control and self-discipline as well as goodness and reason. Michael Maurer discusses the prominent role that English characters play in La Roche’s texts, and how imaginary portrayals of England and its people became intermingled with actual travel reports as it became a more popular travel destination for continental Europeans (including La Roche herself) during the eighteenth century. In one of the most interesting articles, Kevin Hilliard outlines how knowledge, education, and morality became interconnected with a certain experience of nature for La Roche. According to Hilliard, after being denied her own tutor by her father when she was thirteen, La Roche had to quench her thirst for knowledge with the English moral weeklies, which became (and remained) her favorite reading material. She learned to package her desire for insight into a more socially acceptable style that connected the topography of the outside world to the inner world of morality and goodness. As Hilliard writes, “die moralische Welt erschließt sich La Roche topographisch” (73). A preoccupation with a certain metaphorical topography is also apparent in Gaby Pailer’s investigation of La Roche’s literary depictions of Paris and London in conjunction with reports composed about these places during her travels.

Beyond these two groups of essays, there are others that focus on La Roche’s intellectual influences, which help situate her output within a dynamic eighteenth-century network of Empfindsame and Enlightenment sources. Jutta Osinksi’s essay investigates the extent to which La Roche adopted a Rousseauian concept of virtuousness in the Sternheim novel. Gerhard Sauder’s essay, with which the book begins, seeks to clarify La Roche’s relationship to the literary label most often attached to her, namely Empfindsamkeit (“Sensibility”). Sauder suggests that what is different about La Roche’s concept of sensibility is its close connection to the term Wohltätigkeit (“generosity”), which emphasizes that for her sensibility was only a positive state of mind when it led to outwardly directed beneficent actions...