Although her works surpass those of other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German women authors in their radical presentation of women's social and moral conflicts and in their expressive power, Karoline Auguste Fernandine Fischer (her first name is also spelled Caroline) remained practically forgotten until very recently. Despite attempts by Christine Touaillon to resuscitate her reputation in the early 1900s, it took nearly two hundred years and a different public--one more interested in women's historic role in society and more sensitized to their peculiar perspective--to understand and fully appreciate the life and works of this innovative, passionate, uncompromising, and in some ways surprisingly modern writer.

Karoline Auguste Venturini was born on 9 August 1764, the second child of Karl Heinrich Ernst Venturini (1734-1801), court violinist at the Duchy of Brunswick, and Charlotte Juliane Wilhelmine Köchy Venturini (1742-1825), the daughter of a local tailor, who had married Venturini in...