SOURCE: Britt, Christa Bagus. Introduction to Sophie von La Roche's The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, edited by Marilyn Gaddis Rose, pp. 3-30. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Britt looks at La Roche's life, the events leading up to the publication of Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, the various editions of the novel, and the author's place in German literary history, providing a comparative analysis of La Roche's novel with Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

Sophie von La Roche is generally credited with being the first female German novelist and author of the first German women's novel. Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim is the first German Bildungsroman (a novel tracing the cultural formative process of a young person)¹ with a female protagonist, the first full-fledged epistolary novel in German, and the first German sentimental novel.

The production of...