Gabriele Reuter took Wilhelminian society--the German equivalent of Victorian England--by storm in 1895 with her novel Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens (From a Good Family: The Suffering of a Young Woman). Her clear-sighted exposé of the pain and frustration of middle-class women resonated not only in the hearts of many girls and women but, to judge from Reuter's own accounts of its reception, in the hearts of many fathers. It became the catalyst for a protracted public discussion on the education and role of women in modern society. Adopted by the contemporary women's movement as one of their own, Reuter--despite her sympathy for the movement--consistently refused to view her literary works as propagandistic tools for it. Yet she repeatedly portrayed middle-class girls and women, endowing them with her own qualities of modesty and inner strength. In 1904 Thomas Mann called her "die souveränste Frau...