Women and Literature in the Goethe Era 1770-1820: Determined Dilettantes, and: Challenging Separate Spheres: Female Bildung in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Germany (review)

In Women and Literature in the Goethe Era 1770–1820: Determined Dilettantes, Helen Fronius has written an excellent overview of women's complex historical reality and how it affected them as writers during the period of study. In five chapters she elucidates contesting gender ideologies and explores women as authors, women as readers, the literary market, and the public sphere. She registers the shift in discourse as the new ideology of gender characteristics took hold but emphasizes that this was not the only understanding of femininity and masculinity, pointing out that the energetic effort to enforce gender characteristics is itself an indicator of women's resistance. Exploring women as writers, Fronius begins with a useful deconstruction of Goethe's and Schiller's self-serving notion of the dilettante, and then notes the success of women in evading strictures against their writing. As elsewhere in the book she chooses her sources well, in this case surveying the various bibliographies of women writers that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to demonstrate "male desire to contain and control women's writing, whilst being faced with the fait accompli of female authorship" (74).

The chapter about women as readers asks what data can be deployed to indicate literacy, shows the increased diversity and volume of reading in general during the period, reiterates the ideological and practical constraints imposed on women's reading and the male anxieties these constraints imply, and then illustrates women's experiences with the two cases of Luise Mejer (in the factory-like forced reading world of Countess Stolberg) and Elisa von der Recke. The particularly useful chapter about the literary market traces the key step from writing to publishing, arguing that changes in supply and demand in the book trade, especially the burgeoning public taste for belles lettres, enabled women writers to publish by motivating publishers to accept their work. Fronius reinforces the statistical data and some reconstructed information about publishers with a section on women's business letters, illustrating women's often confident and straightforward relations with publishers by citing archival letters from an array of aspiring and mostly successful women, including Julie von Kamecke, Susanne von Bandemer, Caroline Lucius Schlegel, Therese aus dem Winkel, Elise Sommer, and Betty Gleim. The fifth chapter, exploring women's many different ways of entering the public sphere, looks at women writing for periodicals, with the Teutscher Merkur as an example; women taking public stands against the gender discourse of authoritative men, exemplified by the rejection of Campe by Esther Gad and Amalia Holst; and finally three women who wrote in order to salvage their own very public reputations: Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld, Elise Bürger, and Wilhelmine von Lichtenau.

Fronius's book is rich in commentary on the historical record of women's resistance to exclusion and oppression, on the inconsistencies and instabilities of gender ideologies, and on the varied actual behavior by both women and men. Less successful is her effort to cast her arguments as urgently needed corrections to recent feminist scholarship. To make this claim, she does what she charges her predecessors with doing: she oversimplifies feminist scholarship, takes arguments out of context, and ignores or downplays the other side, the large body of feminist work that demonstrates the resilience of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and of some male supporters) despite social pressures. Considering the vast amount of archival and obscure library toil done by the scholars on whom she draws (based on her admirably comprehensive bibliography), it is surprising that she chooses to lecture readers about the need to use primary sources—who disagrees?—but it is excellent that she several times maps lodes of promising materials for others to mine...