Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), Sylphide
Dear friends and readers,
About a week ago we finished a lightning-quick absorbed (for those who participated) reading and discussion of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff’s one work still in print: The Jew’s Beech (first published in 1842), during which we also albeit briefly discussed her life and poetry. She was an important (rare) early 19th century German lyric poet (so foremother poet), and in the way of advertising familiarizations one reads her work and life represent a kind of intersection between the passion and content of Emily Bronte, with her retired life resembling that of Emily Dickinson.
I’ll do one better and suggest her autobiographical novel, Ledwina (which I was able to read a portion of, Englished by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop in Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700-1830) depicted her restricted choices and liberty and all-encompassing apparently kind but repressive family makes me think of Austen:
she so loathed this sad and anxious sheltering, this pitiful cautious life where the body governs the spirit until it, too, becomes as infirm and impoverished as the body itself, loathed it so much that she would gladly have let all her life’s energy, which was glimmering out a spark at a time, flare up and expire in a single blaze
We see her daily life, and as in Austen’s letters, her close relationships with servants. There are strikingly modern passages: for example the heroine grows irritated with herself when she falls asleep (partly tiredness, partly boredom) during the day because as it is she can
scarcely sleep at night; then I get up from time to time and walk about my room; it’s not good for me, but what is one to do with the long night.
What indeed?
Her continual rewriting and perfectionist stance towards each detail of her text recalls Austen too.
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To begin with her life:
Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, 1838 portrait by J. Sprick
Annette von Drost-Hulshoff may be said to be a rare women represented in the German romantic canon, but like so many women before the 19th century, it’s hard to get at the truth of her life. What I have read amounts to two different lives.
Take your choice:
Her birthplace, Burg Hülshoff in Havixbeck, Germany
at wikipedia and from the articles cited you will learn of a woman who was ambitious, wanted a career (planned her publications to make an image) and was thwarted by her family, the prescriptive life laid down for an upper class Catholic German unmarried woman, and bad luck. Her father was learned and gave his daughter an excellent high culture education (tutors in ancient languages, French, natural history, mathematics and music (she inherited considerable musical talent from her father).
We are told she was a member of her brother’s intellectual circles, knew Grimm, Goethe, Schiller and many other illustrious German names. She almost married a Protestant, but was cruelly tricked out of it when family members persuaded a Catholic lawyer to pay court to her. The end result was her reputation was hurt, she presumably shocked by this treachery.
Her father’s death, religious doubts, and her family’s wealth enabled her to live a life of quiet retreat with her mother and family and study and write poetry in the countryside. She wrote long-narrative poems but her work was not marketed skilfully (a backwater publishers) and the commercial failure humiliated her.
But again she tries for a social life, this time a salon in Munster where she meets Levin Schücking, a young poet, whose friendship, sympathy, congeniality inspire her to write again: poetry, The Jew’s Beech. Schucking has to take a position as a tutor in an aristocratic family. New contacts led to a literary success, an invitation by Clara Schuman to write a libretto, but she was betrayed by Schucking who, now married, writes two novels, one exposing the flaws of the aristocracy she belonged to, the other with a portrait of herself that distressed (she is said to have treated the poet like a son), so again she retires, this time to small house by herself and dies of TB. Nonetheless, Schucking was himself responsible for publicizing her work.
Or the life as told by Blackwell and Zantopp (Bitter Healing) and suported by Ledwina (written 1819-26):
The Säntis, a mountain in the Alps near Schloss Eppishausen, which inspired Droste’s poem “Der Säntis”Blackwell and Zantop present Drost-Hulfshoff or Annette as not wanting to have her works published, as reclusive, quiet, and the story of the thwarted love affair becomes not so much a manipulation of her as her being over-sensitive and alienated or different from most of those she met, unconventional in her perceptions, and drawn inwardly by her religious feelings and love for travel and long sojourns in a wild romantic Westphalia landscape. Her relationships were all with family members or close friends; important to her were a Professor Anton Matthias Sprickman of Munster, a woman writer of popular tales, Katharina Brusch, and Adele Schopenhauer (the famous Schopenhauer’s mother who wrote her of travel in the UK). When young, Annette chose to turn away from her brother’s friends (now they are boorish students); she rejected one man who denounced her as arrogant and manipulative. They describe her poetry effectively (inward, intense, her marshes and moors inhabited by demonic nature spirits), some prose works (Pictures from Westphalia, 1842), two unfinished novels (one Englished as Our Country Place, begun 1841).
Both accounts depict her as an isolated and independent woman in character who was often ill: her heroine Ledwina suffers from severe chest pains; she has a widowed mother who has to give up her estate to an unworthy son, sisters desperate to marry but wanting to remain close to one another, a woman who goes mad with shame when she is left a bankrupt widow, another who renounces speech for 14 years to be able to live with her husband. It is an account of un-freedom, a lack of social worth accorded women. The Jew’s Beech presents women in the same light.
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Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood
The Jew’s Beech, another Scheherazade tale:
I can find no plot-summary, but there is an account of the story’s sources in Drost-Hulshoff’s relatives’ experience of peasant culture and court cases recorded by them (see August von Haxthausen) The prosaic feel of everyday life, the anger and greed and competitiveness within families, occasional violence, the pragmaticism which nonetheless accepts superstitions reminded me much of the world of Martin Guerre as described by Charlotte Smith and Natalie Zemon Davis.
Basically it tells us of the lives of a few people who live amid and participate in a fierce smuggling and destruction of timber going on in the local rich woods and lands owned by the wealthy by bands of men desperate to make a living. We are told of foresters who are hired as murderous police on behalf of the state and grandees (who want to protect the game and “their” woods). In effect an unackknowledged all-out war between the haves and have-nots goes on ceaselessly in the background and every once in a while individual people erupt to murder and avenge themselves for humilation or because someone owes them money (or something else) and didn’t pay up.
The translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (reprinted in an Oxford paperback classic) held me because it was rendered in modern lucid idiomatic fluid English. It reads as a startlingly modern fable (rather like a unusually plain Isak Dinesen story) so I expect the translator is part of the new school of translators (pressured to do this by publishers) which modernizes older texts by getting rid of certain kinds of idiosyncracies of the original author or the period. The packaging reminded me of Wolf’s historical fiction set in the same era about the poets Kleist and Gunderrode, Englished as No Place on Earth: the prose style here is the same. It may be that one or both of these texts is distorted.
So, we have a fearful world of peasants seen by a narrator kept at a distance. Violence is the way they control one another and the novel suggests things like drunken beatings, the intense concern with money and surviving as the main motive for people’s actions without admitting it. Margret the mother, loves her son, Frederich, but unhesitatingly lets the uncle take him away to work for him though it seems to me that the uncle is as fierce as Peter Grimes and I would not trust my son with him.
Oddly (again referring to Wolf’s historical fiction) I felt it was sort of an 18th century tale told much later – the way women are said to write in a belated way. It opens in 1738 with the birth of the young hero, Frederick,moves backward to the mother and her bad decision to marry a violent man (but then she was single and it’s said ugly) and then forward to Frederick as a young man — who can be dandy like, sensitive dreamy but also a determined bourgeois. It jumps forward once to July 1756, again four years and ends 28 years later (1788).
Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life shows us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder. What’s on Drost-Hulshoff’s mind is precisely this. The first three pages gives us the framework:
As a result of primitive and often inadequate lesiglature, the ideas of the inhabitants as to right and wrong had become somewhat confused, or rather beside the official legal system there had grown up a second law based on public opinion, usage and superannuaion arising from neglect … legal form mattered less the spirit was adhered to more strictly, infringements occurred ore often … nothing destroys the soul more surely than an appeal to external legal forms in contradiction to one’s inner sense of justice.
Drost-Hulshoff differs from Smith in emphasizing custom and also the vulnerability of women who do suffer terribly in this tale. As a kind of throw-away detail we are told of how at a wedding where everyone is celebrating, a young woman is being married to a very old man who sneers at her and seems to look forward to domineering and being cruel to her. The first time we meet Friedrich’s mother she has decided to marry a man (Friedrich’s father) who we have seen be somehow hideously cruel to his first wife so that she flees from him in the night all bloody and thereafter lives with her parents and not soon after that dies. Friedrich’s mother receives the same treatment from this man who we are told makes an exception for his son, which makes his son tender to the father.
It ends enigmatically. There are two murders and after the first murder was committed I was convinced that Friedrich had not done it. He was an accomplice with the lumber thieves, but not the prime actor. After the second the murder of the lender Jew Aaron (who is presented anti-semitically), as he had humiliated Friedrich, I thought he had done at least that one (though it’s never stated), and then when his corpse is found by the Jew’s beech tree, although it was implied that after years of exile and flight, he had returned and killed himself near where the Jew he killed died, I was not sure.
I am particularly struck by her originality and unconventionality. How different this is from the sentimental pirate and other tales of the French at the time. I thought of Marmontel’s Shepherdess of the Alps, but also the tales of sensibility of Germane de Stael. It is wholly alien in the way of Emily Bronte’s stances.
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Johan Christian Claussen Dah (1788-1856), Dresden by Moonlight (1850)
We had some very good talk and I’d like to include some of the postings of two friends on WWTTA. Fran, a reader of German, very knowledgeable in its literature, wrote as quietly brilliantly as she usually does:
Glad you’re enjoying this hauntingly puzzling tale, Ellen. I’ve already re-read the German text and the notes in my new edition, so I’ll try and make time to see how the English translation compares with the original as well. I’ll probably be using the older online translation, though.
You’ll probably have seen from other sources that Droste-Hülshoff based her story on true events, ones that her ancestors had been involved in. The historical murder took place on 10.2.1783 when Soestmann-Behrens, a so-called ‘Schutzjude'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzjude), was killed by Hermann Georg Winkelhagen, a farm worker from Bellersen (the B. in the text) after an argument about an unpaid bill.Though Droste-Hülshoff purposedly clouds the issue of who actually murdered the Jewish merchant in her text, there seems to have been no such doubt as to Winkelhagen’s own guilt.
At the time, D-H’s maternal grandfather (some sources say great-grandfather) Caspar Moritz von Haxthausen zu Abbenburg, an aristocratic landowner, was also serving as judge at the patrimonial court in charge of the case, so the details were passed down in family lore.
Like the assumed murderer in D-H’s story, Winkelhagen fled capture, but in the course of his adventures was picked up by pirates and sold into Algerian slavery. This lasted until 1805, when he and 231 fellow prisoners were freed by Jérôme, Napoleon’s brother. Winkelhagen then made his way back to Bellersen, arriving in April 1806, only to hang himself later in the woods on 18.9.1806.
From these dates, you can see that D-H did choose to set her own story further back in time as you thought.
It’s interesting that you should mention the sentimental pirate tales popular at the time since D-H.’s uncle August had already published a version of Winkelhagen’s story under the title of ‘The Story of an Algerian Slave’ in 1818, which played up the pirate and slavery scenario much more.
I’ve read that version, too, as it was in the notes. It’s a much more
straightforward, unambiguous account, though the Algerian side of the events as described there are actually held to be almost entirely fictitious, written perhaps to cash in on the wave of interest you indicate, whilst the details of the murder itself seem to have been more solidly based on the surviving details of the original case.Since the subject of anti-semitism has already come up, it was interesting to read there that Winkelhagen had first been taken to court by Soestmann-Behrens for defaulting on payment of some cloth and that W. had expected to be let off since his accuser was ‘just’ a Jew. He wasn’t: the court found in favour of his accuser and W. retaliated by violence. When he returned from slavery, the matter of whether to prosecute the murder came up again, but it was deemed that his 24 years of exile, imprisonment and forced labour had already been punishment enough.
Interestingly enough, Droste-Hülshoff didn’t read her uncle’s version until after she had written all or most of her own story and, whilst she notes wanting to introduce some of the details he mentioned that she had initially forgotten, she also mentions not wanting to re-write the whole thing, underlining in particular how very different her fictional portrayal of the supposed murderer was from her uncle’s portrayal of the historical W.
She actually did revise this short tale again again over a long period of time, perhaps because it was one of her first adventures into prose. There seem to be eight, extant, much revised drafts or manuscript versions, which makes establishing an accurate text history pretty difficult.
This process of constant revision might also be the reason why this is her only completed prose text, whilst the rest remain as mere fragments.
Continued in the comments where I end with two lyrics and a bibliography.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Fran again about an edition on Amazon with good notes (which I didn’t have):
I’ve just looked at Amazon as I was interested to see how the version translated the subtitle in particular, ie. as
‘A Portrait of Life in the Hills of Westphalia’. The German is ‘Ein
Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgichten Westphalen’ and it’s the word ‘Sittengemälde’ that’s worth more discussion.
As the English version also implies, it’s an expression originally used in the
graphic arts – ‘Gemälde’ means ‘painting’ – and is there normally translated as ‘genre picture’, those paintings of ordinary people indulging in everyday
activities the Dutch and Flemish painters, for example, helped make popular.
The first part of the compound, ‘Sitten-‘, is the more evocative part, since it
can be variously translated to mean customs, manners and morals, all three of which Droste-Hülshoff enters into in her work.
Another common translation for the whole is ‘milieu study’ and it’s this aspect of the story, the way the characters are shaped and often deformed by their social environment, that has people seeing D-H. as a serious precursor to German Naturalism. ‘The Jew’s Beech’ wasn’t D-H’s original title at all. The work’s first mention was in an 1837 letter to Junkmann, where she talks about fishing some good things back out of the drawer to work on, including her ‘Criminalgeschichte, Friedrich Mergel’ (Crime Story..), which was intended as part of a never completed work on a study and portrait of her home state Westphalia.
Her friend Schücking then took the finished short story to editor Hermann Hauff (the famous German fairy tale writer’s brother) for serial publication in his ‘Morgenblatt’ in 1842 under what was originally a main header in the projected work, ‘Sittengemälde…’. Hauff said he would keep that as a subtitle, but asked him to come up with another main title instead, and when Schücking couldn’t on the spur of the moment, Hauff chose ‘The Jew’s Beech Tree’.
Some sources suggest this annoyed D-H, but the letter excerpts my edition quotes at least don’t bear this out; she was more bugged by some cuts Hauff had made, which first had her storming off (‘like a wild cat’ ) in a furious walk to the next village – shades of Austen’s walkers here – but she’d also calmed down on the walk back and upon further reflection could finally accept them.
I’d been hoping the collected edition I’d ordered would also include her letters since she seems to have had a very lively, ironic and sometimes self-ironic, sense of humour, as in the whole passage on this walk, but it only has excerpts to underline points and interpretations in the notes.
Back to the crime story. As coincidence would have it, D-H’s final version happened to appear only a short while after the publication of Poe’s, ‘The Murder in the Rue Morgue'(1841), often regarded as the first detective story. One of the more intriguingly ‘modern’ aspects of D-H’s own crime story is that it actually interacts with the reader and turns him/her into
the detective her own story nominally lacks, trying to piece together the many clues and red herrings her text baits the reader with and so find some kind of resolution to the many open questions she leaves.
Very rare even today: D-H suggests marital rape as a banal occurrence — and distressing women who endure it very much.
Fran:
I finally got round to reading the English version of ‘The Jew’s Beech’ on the train, using the Project Gutenberg translation. A seemlingly small, but significant, translation error struck my eye at the beginning, so I was wondering if the more modern translations carried it, too. It comes where Margreth has thrown herself down crying in the garden. The Gutenberg says she looked around anxiously before picking off some vegetables and then returned with them not to the house, but to the barn. In the German it’s not vegetables'(Gemüse), but ‘Kraüter’ (herbs) that she picked.
The description of that whole section is actually intriguingly ambiguous in the orginal. The Gutenberg also says that was thought to have been the first time her husband had struck her, but the German, ‘Hand an sie legen’, while it can mean ‘strike’ or ‘hit’, can also mean ‘lay hands on her’ in the sense of assault, so Droste-Hülshoff could have been delicately implying marital rape here. The same thing may well have had the first wife running off screaming back to her parents and effectively caused her complete withdrawal and early death.The fact that Margreth quasi surreptitiously picked the herbs and disappeared into the barn with them could also have been meant to imply she was going to try and prevent any issue coming from that rape. All this would also tie in with the later mention of Friedrich having been carried in the womb under an aggrieved heart and her ‘bitterly crying’ at Friedrich’s birth, perhaps at the failure to abort.
That was my first impression on reading at least. I’ve read speculation elsewhere that the herbs may have been intended to off her husband, but that doesn’t to me seem to be borne out by anything else in the text.
How does this section read in your translation, Ellen?”
My reply:
Yes and yes. I had not seen the desire to abort either. In my edition just that language is used: “lay hands on her.” I had not used the phrase “marital rape” myself in thinking about it, just violent cruel sex (just — what a black joke such a word should be).
This is utterly hidden by women today, or men accuse them as as if they were vicious of wanting to kill a child.
I have to say how much more she can say in prose than poetry. The verse limits her topic, her stance, controls her diction so it cannot do what she does here. This reminds me of Walter Scott.
Much still remains enigmatic. thought of Wharton’s “Lady’s Maid’s Bell” because it’s gothic, about hidden male violence decided it was supposed to be obscure as this story is told in a distanced way intended to remain obscure in the way life often is.
It really is an extraordinary text. I suggest while the resort to an
autobiographical context (not in my edition so I have it only from your postings Fran) is understandable, justifiable, indeed valid, still it has the effect of making it less disquieting. So much in it is troubling.
We were inspired to read the story, about Annette and her prose by another member of the list, Diane R who is researching a German writer of the mid-20th century and thus read this story. This is from her first posting:
I read her novella, The Jew’s Beech, which has been translated into English and is available on line. According to the Wikipedia entry, D-H was treated poorly by people in her life and tricked rather cruelly out of a marriage with a middle class man (she was an aristocrat). The Jew’s Beech is an interesting story which Bonhoeffer [the man she is working on] read aloud one day to his seminarians at Finkenwalde in 1935. Parallels to Nazism, especially in terms of anti-Semitism, would have been completely evident. I was struck by how hard life was for village peasants in that story and how harsh and even cruel they were to each other. However, when the scene shifts to the pov of the lord of the manor, life becomes much more genteel-dare I say Jane Austen-like–because there are ample resources and everyone is not caught up in ignorance, want and fear. It would be interesting to more closely compare Droste-Hulshoff and Austen. Hulshoff knew the Grimm brothers and seemed to have a greater awareness of the life of the peasant or rural class than Austen.
Fran said of this:
Interesting to read of that mental association with the brownshirts. I hadn’t
thought of that, but can see how people could relate to it in the 30s,
especially with the uncle figure, too, as a dubious leader and perverter of
youthful morals.
My own associations were more literary – Schiller’s ‘Crime of Lost Honour’,
which we talked about in connection with one of the seven Gothic novels parodied in Northanger Abbey and which I’d like to research as a possible influence on D-H here and also the band of Cornish smugglers and wreckers as described in ‘Jamaica Inn’.
The striking quote both you and Ellen rightly underline,
“nothing destroys the soul more surely than an appeal to external legal forms in contradiction to one’s inner sense of justice.”
also reminded me of Kleist’s concerns in ‘Michael Kohlhaas’.
You also bring up yet another interesting point: early conservationism and
sustainability principles. The ongoing struggles between landlord and landless when it came to the use of the forest were actual historical issues in the region and the subject of ongoing court disputes. The landless had an ancient right to gather dead and fallen wood in the forest, which landowners began to dispute, ostensibly or actually because people were also illegally and uncontrollably cutting down new wood and so damaging the sustainability of the wood supply.
The gathering of dead wood was probably at first a win-win situation since it
would accrue no labour costs, contribute to the hygiene of the forests as dead wood attracts insect infestation that spreads to and ultimately destroys living trees and also help to provide for the poor at the same time. Up to the time of the story in question the courts had apparently usually found in favour of these customary rights and thus of the landless.
On a private note, ‘Holzfrevel’ a lovely old word usually translated into the
much more banal, ‘infringement against forestry law’, but literally = wood
sacrilege, is still an ongoing issue.
And finally two poems, articles and one book.
The second reminds me of Goethe’s ballads:
On the Tower
I stand aloft on the balcony,
The starlings around me crying,
And let like maenad my hair stream free
To the storm o’er the ramparts flying.
Oh headlong wind, on this narrow ledge
I would I could try thy muscle
And, breast to breast, two steps from the edge,
Fight it out in a deadly tussle.
Beneath me I see, like hounds at play,
How billow on billow dashes;
Yea, tossing aloft the glittering spray,
The fierce throng hisses and clashes.
Oh, might I leap into the raging flood
And urge on the pack to harry
The hidden glades of the coral wood,
For the walrus, a worthy quarry!
From yonder mast a flag streams out
As bold as a royal pennant;
I can watch the good ship lunge about
From this tower of which I am tenant;
But oh, might I be in the battling ship,
Might I seize the rudder and steer her,
How gay o’er the foaming reef we’d slip
Like the sea-gulls circling near her!
Were I a hunter wandering free,
Or a soldier in some sort of fashion,
Or if I at least a man might be,
The heav’ns would grant me my passion.
But now I must sit as fine and still
As a child in its best of dresses,
And only in secret may have my will
And give to the wind my tresses.
The Last Day of the Year
The year at its turn,
the whirring thread unrolls.
One hour more, the last today,
and what was living time is scrolls
of dust dropping into a grave.
I wait in stern
silence. O deep night!
Is there an open eye?
Time, your flowing passage shakes
these walls. I shiver, my
one need is to observe. Night wakes
in solitude. I light
my eyes to all
that I have done and thought.
All that was in my head and heart
now stands like sullen rot
at Heaven’s door. Victory in part –
the rest a fall
into dark wind
whipping my house! Yes, this year
will shatter and ride on the wings
of storm; not breathe under the clear
light of stars like quiet things.
You, child of sin,
has there not been
a hollow, secret quiver each
day in your savage chest,
as the polar winds reach
across the stones, breaking, possessed
with slow and in-
sistent rage? Now my lamp
is about to die; the wick
greedily sucks the last drop of oil.
Is my life like smoke lick-
ing the oil? Will death’s cave uncoil
See More:
http://allpoetry.com/Annette_Von_Droste-Hulshoff
Susan Cocalis in her Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems has two but the translations are much poorer, stiff and unmusical.
Brumm, Anna Marie. “The Poetry of Regionalism, Feminine Vioces of the 19th Century: Emily Dickinson and Anne von Dtrost-Hulshoff,” Comparative Literature Quarterly 21:2 (1985):83-91.
——————. “Time, the Bride and the Double in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Anne von Drost-Hulshoff,” Dickinson Studies 61 (1987):27-38.
Lientina-Ray, Maruta. “Annete von Droste-Hulshoff and Critics of The Jew’s Beech,” Woman as Mediatrix: Essay on 19th Century Women Writers, ed. Avriel Goldberger. NY: Greenwood, 1987, p. 12-31.
Morgan, Mary. Annette von Droste-Hulshoff: A Biography. NY: Peter Lang, 1984.
E.M.
On the issue of foremothers, you might also be interested in an essay by Elisabeth Lenckos in Persuasions 33: “Johanna von Austen, ‘A Fatal Bluestocking from the Good Old Days’: Jane Austen, Madame de Staël, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and the Woman Artist.” It focuses on D-H’s satirical verse drama Perdu!
Thank you very much, Susan. Very much. I’ll look at it. I’ll be putting a reference to a good review of Robert Frail’s book on French and English relationships later this morning. You’ve probably read it (by Gillian Dow, done in 2008) but it bears re-reading :). Ellen
Fran wrote:
I don’t think I can access the Lenckos article, but the Johanna von Austen character did strike my eye when I was flicking through that new edition of mine. She appears in a one-act comedy called ‘Perdu!’ subtitled ‘Poets, Publishers and Bluestockings’. I haven’t read it, but have just taken a quick look at the notes, and it appears to have been something of an oeuvre à clef, based on events and people in Droste-Hülshoff’s circle. Johanna von Austen is supposed to be an affectionate portrait of Henriette von Hohenhausen, a minor writer and aunt of one of her close friends. D-H apparently also gives a self-ironic portrait of herself as Frau von Thielen, an aristocratic bluestocking.
The notes quote her as saying she was reluctantly trying her hand at comedy since family and friends had been pressuring her to do so for a long time. She seemed to feel there were so many aspects of comedy that would be seen as unseemly in coming from a woman’s hand, but also that such considerations and restrictions wouldn’t exactly be conducive to humour either. From the little I’ve read of her private letters I can imagine why her family might feel she’d be good at it, but she also implies it’s easy to be amusing privately amongst friends in good company, but much less so when compelled to bring it to the blank page.
Ledwina is in there, too, so perhaps I’ll give them both a go.
Fran
This article is not available on line as yet: it appears as the very last article in the most recent _Persuasions_:33 (2011):244-53, by Elisabeth Lenckos. Lenckos does focus in on a satiric play, _Perdu!_. Its significance is its portraits of literary women are conflicted; they both expose and are hostile to, yet show sympathy for literary women (bluestockings so called), as Drost-Hulshoff makes them into varied versions of herself, or the versions others made out of her when she was in public. Anna von Thielson is a woman reluctant to submit her poems for publication. There are particularly aggressive women, one in publishing, and the other in her life at home and in salons; there is a woman mocked for her romantic self-exposing poetry as an exhibitionist hysteric (what some reviewers called Drost-Hulshoff). And there is an unmarried bluestocking named Johanna Austen who is presented satirically as a “myopic spinster whose aspiration for fame goes no further than selling books in a bookstore. It’s not far from right 🙂
Some of this must have been painful, some cathartic to write. She was dramatizing her own conflicts and experiences as a literary woman and poet. I see her as berating herself too.
The question is, Did D-H know Austen’s works, how, and what was her attitude. The opening part of the article tells us Austen did not appeal to German romantics, she was “out of touch” with revolutionary attitudes. True enough Austen is not sympathetic to romantic attitudes. Lenckos has an older view of Austen (anti-romance strongly). But she did have literary and journalistic friends who would have known about Austen and had access to translations.
There are a number of such articles — Austen’s translations in, influence in — say China in this number.
I’d like to go on too, Fran and hope to have a good biography by Mary Morgan in hand soon.
Ellen
This essay retells the Drost-Hulshoff’s life more persuasively than any I’ve read thus far, and offers a critical assessment of her work:
http://www.enotes.com/annette-von-droste-hulshoff-criticism/droste-hulshoff-annette-von
Ellen