Louise Otto-Peters--who signed most of her books Louise Otto and was most commonly known by that name--was the founder of the bourgeois German women's movement that lumbered to life in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was a prolific producer of novels and also wrote novellas, short stories, opera librettos, and poetry. But her reputation rests on her polemical writings, which advocated women's rights and political liberalism. Like many of her liberal contemporaries, Otto-Peters seems to have written poetry and fiction to gain income to support her more controversial writings and activities. Generally acknowledged as the mother of German feminism, she was as active in politics as she was in the sphere--more socially acceptable for women--of poetic creativity. Thus, even her fictional writings, although they are often set in the past, tend to be filled with tendentious contemporary political messages. All of Otto-Peters's writings reflect her...