Renate Feyl

Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) counts as the first German woman writer to earn a living from sales of her books, and as an important bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic literature. She was a close friend of the poet Wieland, and corresponded with many of the great figures of the French and British Enlightenment, but she was also a kind of mentor figure to the young Goethe and Schiller, and as grandmother to the many Brentano children she was linked to just about everyone who was anyone in literary Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her novels encouraged their middle-class, female readers to take control of their own destinies, and she edited and published a pioneering women's magazine, Pomona.

The young Goethe flirted simultaneously with Sophie and her daughter Maxe, drawing on Maxe's appearance and Sophie's book as inspiration for Werther; later on Sophie's granddaughter Bettina had a gigantic (but possibly one-sided) crush on him...

Feyl's historical novel picks up Sophie's life at the age of forty in 1771, when the publication of her first novel Fräulein von Sternheim has shot her from being the very ordinary wife of a senior official in the court of the Electorate of Trier to major literary celebrity, and follows her career up to the publication of her final novel in 1806, by which time she counted as a near-forgotten figure from an earlier period. Dealing with characters who over-documented almost every detail of their lives in implausible quantities of letters, diaries and memoirs, Feyl doesn't do much with the extra freedom the fictional form gives her: It's more like a dramatised biography than a real novel, with the imaginative input limited to lines of dialogue. The focus is on Sophie's sense of obligation towards her children and husband and the way she follows the logic of this into becoming "someone who writes for money", quite against the conventions of her time and class.

Don't expect a nineties take on Lotte in Weimar, this is a fast, light read, but very enjoyable, and a good way into the period if you don't know how everyone fits together.… (more)