SOURCE: Petschauer, Peter. “Sophie von La Roche: Novelist between Reason and Emotion.” The Germanic Review 57, no. 2 (spring/summer 1982): 70-77.

In the following essay, Petschauer discusses La Roche's moderate Romanticism.

During and after her life, Sophie von La Roche was acclaimed for many reasons. Most importantly, she was the first great love of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland, and she was hailed as one of Germany's first successful female novelists. Just as importantly, years before Theodore von Hippel and Mary Wollstonecraft, she concerned herself with issues that later were at the core of feminist discussions.¹ It was a reading of her best known and most acknowledged achievement, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, which sparked this further investigation.²

Why did this advocate of better educated and more socially involved women not have a greater permanent appeal? Why did she not emerge as the leading writer of the Romantic...