Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere, 1750–1850 ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Lauren Nossett (review)

This fascinating collection shifts focus away from the tendency of eighteenth-century women writers to understate their own literary contributions and toward an emphasis on direct and indirect influences on their creative processes. The editors’ succinct and informative introduction summarizes women’s literary production as shaped by education, class, familial and sociocultural ideology and norms, genres, themes, and the book trade. The challenge that male intellectuals presented in acknowledging women’s abilities highlights women’s need to consistently and creatively negotiate the literary marketplace. The volume’s three sections, “Writing a Community,” “Writing the Self,” and “Writing toward Emancipation,” reveal such strategies but also suggest how profoundly eighteenth-century definitions of gender complicate our understanding of women’s authorship.

Three of the four essays in the first section focus on Sophie von La Roche, the first professional German woman writer. Monika Nenon sees a pedagogical program laid out for young women of all social classes in La Roche’s nonfictional writing, specifically the journal Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter (1783–84; Pomona for Germany’s daughters) and the epistolary travel book Journal einer Reise nach Frankreich (1787; Journal of a journey through France). Beyond La Roche’s engagement of her own daughters as audience, Nossett investigates the writer’s cultivation of herself as a “maternal literary authority” (46) who encourages reading despite “risk and conflict” (50) as central to education. Angela Sanmann brings to the “seemingly docile medium of translation” (69) an analysis that reveals progressive, “emancipatory thrusts” (77) in Marie-Elisabeth de La Fite’s 1773 translation of La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; The history of Lady Sophia Sternheim) into French. The translation counters male editors’ attempted intrusions into the text and serves as a key source for the 1776 English translation. The odd chapter here, though thematically fitting, is Ruth Dawson’s consideration of Catherine II’s literary collaborations with poet Polyxene Dilthey Büsching and writer Johanna Charlotte Unzer. If not for Dawson’s literary sleuthing, Büsching’s work with the two women would have remained invisible, as Büsching’s husband’s 1777 biography of his wife intended.

The essays in the second section consider individual authors’ pushback against patriarchal censorship and silencing. In similar ghost stories—one by Benedikte Naubert and one by Sophie Albrecht—Sara Luly considers how the “doubling of the self ” (120) reflects women’s authorship and where censorship and ambiguous endings neutralize previous vilifications of the “gelehrte Frau,” or learned woman (120). Amy Jones reads “reverse vampirism” in Günderrode’s poem “Die Bande der Liebe” (1804; The bonds of love) as a response to an 1802 letter from Clemens Brentano that Jones refers to as the “Vampire Letter” (142). Instead of sucking blood from life, Günderrode’s gender-fluid poetic I breathes life into death, an essential rebirth that rejects eighteenth-century discourses that pathologize female writers. Karin Baumgartner recounts the struggle of Helmina von Chézy, granddaughter of Anna Louisa Karsch, to establish a women’s literary journal and to find her own voice in the chorus of surrounding talented women. Finally, Julie L. J. Koehler considers connections between creativity and domesticity, spheres deemed incompatible by male fairy-tale gatekeepers. Three collections by Märchenomas (fairy-tale-telling women) reveal links to French author Madame d’Aulnoy and present a female tradition of community over competition.

The final section emphasizes unique emancipatory efforts of writing women, beginning with Margaretmary Daley’s analysis of the anonymously published Bildungsroman Agnes von Lilien (1796). The novel tells of an illegitimate daughter’s search for her biological parents on the cusp of her own marriage, which Daley sees mirroring Caroline von Wolzogen’s process to claim ownership of the novel. Renata Fuchs’s essay on Louise Aston and Fanny Lewald reminds us that their...