SOURCE: Winkle, Sally. “Innovation and Convention in Sophie La Roche's The Story of Miss von Sternheim and Rosalia's Letters.” In Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, edited by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, pp. 77-94. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Winkle compares La Roche's The Story of Miss von Sternheim to Rosalia's Letters, demonstrating that La Roche became increasingly conventional in her style and subject matter as she espoused the developing late eighteenth-century view of the intrinsic differences between men and women.

In 1771, with the publication of her first novel, The Story of Miss von Sternheim, Sophie La Roche's subjective portrayal of women and her use of a more personal, colloquial language catapulted her to fame among a new generation of German authors and readers. Despite her initial success, however, La Roche's fate was typical of numerous women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...