Woodford Charlotte - Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in Its Cultural Context

Editorial Committee

Chair: Professor Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford)

Dr Barbara Burns (Glasgow University)

Professor Jane Fenoulhet (University College London)

Professor Anne Fuchs (University of Warwick)

Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London)

Dr Almut Suerbaum (University of Oxford)

Professor Susanne Kord (University College London)

Professor John Zilcosky (University of Toronto)

Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland. The chronological scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages down to the present day.

APPEARING IN THIS SERIES

1. Yvan Goll: The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole, by Robert Vilain

2. Sebalds Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, by Helen Finch

3. Goethes Visual World, by Pamela Currie

4. German Narratives of Belonging:Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Shortt

5. The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing, by Charlotte Lee

6. Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context, by Charlotte Woodford

Managing Editor

Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

www.legendabooks.com

I am greatly indebted to the British Academy for a Mid-Career Fellowship (201112), during which most of the research and writing for this book took place. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my former doctoral supervisor Professor Helen Watanabe-OKelly, whose support of this project and enthusiastic encouragement over many years made all the difference. I am very grateful to Professor Elizabeth Boa who was kind enough to read the initial manuscript of this book. I have particularly benefitted from her valuable and supportive comments. Moreover, her thought-provoking contribution to The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2012), which I co-edited with Benedict Schofield, first gave me the idea of writing a study on womens protest fiction. Many thanks, too, are owing to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to the Tiarks Fund and the Schrder Endowment of the Department of German at the University of Cambridge, for additional financial support, and to the editors of German Life and Letters for permission to include in part of my article Suffering and Domesticity: The Subversion of Senti mentalism in Three Stories by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, German Life and Letters , 59 (2006), 4761.

I would like to thank Professor Ritchie Robertson for his valuable advice at different stages of this project, and Barbara Burns for her insightful comments on the manuscript. I am very grateful also to Susan Wharton and Graham Nelson for their expert editorial assistance and advice; Michael Tilby for his constant encouragement of my research; Godela Weiss-Sussex for her generous help and invaluable discussions; the contributors to The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century for their insights into revaluating fiction that did not make it into the national canon; and my colleagues in the Department of German at the University of Cambridge who have read and commented helpfully on sections of this work. Excellent suggestions made at various stages by Professor Joachim Whaley and Professor David Midgley have informed the shape of this final version.

This book would not have been possible at all without the long-term support and encouragement of my family. I would like to thank especially my parents Anne and Geoff Pears and my husband Patrick, also Richard and Michelle Woodford, Ian and Betty Kershaw, and my three children: this book is dedicated to Isabelle, Nicholas and Madeleine.

C.W. , June 2014

A DAMS , H OPE B RIDGES (also known as Dr H. B. Adams-Lehmann), Das Frauenbuch. Ein rztlicher Ratgeber fr die Frau in der Familie und bei Frauenkrankheiten , 2 vols (Stuttgart: Sddeutsches Verlags-Institut, 1896)