SOURCE: Sharpe, Lesley. “The Enlightenment.” In A History of Women's Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, edited by Jo Catling, pp. 47-49; 60-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Sharpe provides a brief introduction to late eighteenth-century German women's writing and offers a discussion of La Roche's life and works.

The period covered in this chapter saw the decisive emergence of the female writer and of a female reading public. Literacy expanded considerably in the German states during the eighteenth century, including literacy among women, whose education had frequently been neglected, and the reading of imaginative literature as a leisure activity gained respectability among the expanding middle classes. Whereas at the beginning of the period even literate women rarely read anything beyond household manuals or works of religious edification, by the end of the eighteenth century male commentators were voicing concern about the sorry effects of...