Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe (1749-1832) (review)

Goethe Yearbook 431 Anthony Harper and Margaret Ives, eds., Sappho in the Shadows: Essays on the Work of German Women Poets of the Age of Goethe (1749-1832). Berne, Berlin, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000. 280 pp. While women playwrights and novelists of the Age of Goethe have been the subject of extensive research over the past twenty years, female poets of the same period have received less scholarly attention. In part, this is because women's poetry, frequently scattered throughout various journals, is both more difficult to locate and harder to recognize as a literary work than are longer prose or dramatic texts. Few women poets of the age managed to collect and publish their work in book form; posthumous anthologies of women's poetry, like Gisela BrinkerGabler 's Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. fahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart or Susan Cocalis's The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (both 1986) are rare and have usually not been kept in print. If women poets of the age are under-researched compared to female novelists, diarists, playwrights or epistolary authors, there is good reason to assume that they were also more numerous than female authors in other genres, that poetry, in fact, constituted one of the predominant literary genres for women writers. The time constraints and the constant interruptions by household tasks and childcare that characterized most of their writing lives must have resulted in working conditions more favorable to the creation of short genres like poetry or letters than longer works like dramas or novels. Sappho in the Shadows defines itself as an introductory study of seven eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century German women poets; its goal is to provide "contextual information about their lives and works accompanied by samples of their poetry in the original German, followed by translations into English" (Harper and Ives, "Introduction," 11). Aside from the essays on Friederike Bran (by Brian Keith-Smith) and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (by Marion E. Gibbs), all chapters in the volume are authored by one of the co-editors (Margaret Ives on Anna Louisa Karsch, Gabriele Baumberg, and Karoline von Gündenode, Anthony Harper on Sophie Mereau and Luise Hensel). Appended to each essay is a short selection of the author's poetry in the original German and English translation. Bibliographies of manuscripts, archival materials, editions of poetry and primary texts, biographies, reference works, and secondary sources on each author are appended to the volume. Harper and Ives's introduction characterizes the undertaking as influenced by what researchers in German women's studies have referred to as the "feminist archaeology" of the 1970s and early 1980s, as part of the project of (re> discovering largely obscure women writers. It seems a strange principle to apply to this volume, since only two of the seven women discussed here, Gabriele Baumberg and Friederike Bran, are in need of such discovery and introductory assessment; the others—Karsch, Gündenode, Mereau, Hensel and certainly Droste -Hülshoff—have all been the subject of both descriptive and analytical research, research that to my thinking transcends the largely biographical treatment most of these authors receive here. As the introduction makes clear, the organizing principle of the volume is chronological and biographical rather than generic: poetry as a genre and the status of these writers as poets vis-à -vis contemporary 432 Book Reviews women writers in other genres is not thematized. That the volume's methodological orientation was inspired by feminist research of the 1970s and 1980s rather than more recent methodologies expresses itself not only in the stated necessity to rediscover or "introduce" these women writers, a necessity that could be argued with in five of the seven cases presented here, but also in the way in which many of these authors are contextualized in literary history, namely vis-à -vis or as opposed to contemporary male writers. In this volume, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers are placed much further into the "shadows" than research of the 1990s has made them out to be: The famous dramatic and epistolary author Luise Gottsched is viewed in the same way in which she appears in the "introductory" research of...