Evolutionary Theory and the Female Scientist in Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Ein Arzt der Seele (1869)

Between 1869 and 1906, Hillern’s novel about a female scientist, Ein Arzt der Seele, appeared in six German editions and two English translations. Recent scholarship categorizes this popular novel as a female Bildungsroman and criticizes its conventional marriage plot. My reading argues that the novel overlaid its traditional elements with evolutionary theory, ideas, and metaphors informed by the first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. In so doing, a genre that had long explored questions about women’s roles in the public and private spheres became recast as one in which midcentury scientific discussions informed the answers to those questions.