Louise von François: A Feminist Reintroduction

Louise von François: A Feminist Reintroduction Thomas C. Fox Louise von François findet den Weg zur Selbst ändigkeit der Frau unabhängig vom Manne in der Freiheit des Wirkens. Darum sollte die Frauenemanzipation unter ihren frühen Vorkämpferinnen auch die Schöpferin der "letzten Reckenburgerin" ehren. Dr. Bertha Badt-Strauß (1924) When Gustav Freytag applauded Louise von Francois's first novel Die letzte Reckenburgerin (1870) in Neues Reich, he generated for author and work Tïïstant literary respectability, indeed acclaim; celebrating the writing as "ächte Dichterarbeit ," Freytag decreed her novel one of the finest in decades. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach sent François admiring letters; for Fritz Reuter the book served as inspiration; the noted man of letters, Karl Hillebrand, thought it stood practically alone in German literature. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer prophesied confidently: "Die 'Reckenburgerin' bleibt." Meyer's prediction has proved too sanguine. The Reckenburgerin has not endured, despite Edward Engel's assertion, in 1906, that François belonged to "the great, indeed to the greatest" nineteenth-century writers (Erzähler); despite Arthur Eloesser's insistence in 1931 that François had, with Die letzte Reckenburgerin, surpassed all her male contemporaries; despite Emil Staiger's attempt, in 1954, to rank her with Storm or Raabe. François lingers in obscurity today, unremembered even by scholars determined ±o document the contribution of women in the nineteenth-century. In the following I want to redirect attention to the biography, reception, and magnum opus of an author who, working in the interval between Bettine von Arnim and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, wrote what I consider the outstanding novel by a German-speaking woman of the last century. In her writing as in her life, François (1817-1893) demonstrated a commitment to what Elaine Showalter terms "feminine," i.e., traditional rather than feminist values. Though she broke an engagement and never married, François invariably emphasized her "matronly" qualities such as domesticity, love of children, and service for others. If by so doing she desired to direct attention from her literary activities, she succeeded; Ebner-Eschenbach wrote approvingly: "Die Schriftstellerin ist untergegangen in der aufopfernden 123 Wohltäterin der Armen, der treuen Freundin, der warmherzigen, fürsorglichen Verwandten." Society conditioned François, like other nineteenth-century female authors, to consider her writing an extension of her "womanly" concerns and her heroines often function as compassionate mothers or nurses engaged in selfless service. Thus Anton Bettelheim, who early in this century published Francois's correspondence with Marie von EbnerEschenbach and C. F. Meyer, commented approvingly that François acted as a Samaritan both in her life and in her writing. During the 1950's Ernst Alker demonstrated the fashion in which nineteenth-century gender roles continued to inform the language of literary criticism: "Die Unverheiratete, die Kinderlose gab in ihren Büchern das qganze Reichtum ihrer Mütterl ichkeit—iher Hausmütterlichkeit." François wanted to train in medicine, a nearly impossible wish for a nineteenth-century German female; instead, she received little education and no career preparation whatsoever. An unmarried woman, she remained long dependent upon her family which, together with François herself, considered it self-evident she nurse her elderly uncle, Karl von François, her blind step-father, and her invalid mother. Like George Sand, François wrote late at night or in early morning, free from the distraction of domestic tasks. She did not reveal her literary activities to her parents. Her educational disadvantage François could partly offset by subverting traditional roles; rather like George Eliot, who studied German, Italian, and Latin while caring for her father at Nuneaton, François acquired an extensive historical knowledge, which serves as background for her writing, while reading to her step-father. She succeeded in her autodidactic endeavors, publishing—pseudonymously--a history of the Wars of Liberation which found use as a textbook in a Prussian officer's academy. Gustav Freytag, who never met François, surmised her to be well-educated; more recently Werner Kohlschmidt, who classes the Reckenburgerin with the best historical novels, labeled her achievement astounding." Like the English women writers Elaine Showalter has examined, François began publishing relatively late in life and only...