Amanda Rose Bingham and Dr. Cindy Brewer, German and Slavic Languages

While women have received focused attention in the recent decades, the early romantic German writer, Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, has not had proportionate consideration from literary critics. Modern readers of German literature are likely to be most familiar with the canonical texts such as Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, primarily written by men, whereas these texts may have received less attention when published. Texts by many women writers of that same time period are considered by many scholars today to be trivial literature although they had much wider readership. The texts resonated with the general public and can provide greater cultural insights.

As with many women writers of the 18th century, many important and noteworthy writings have been overlooked and forgotten. Not only was Schlegel an outsider in the literary scene due to the fact that she was a woman, but she was also born and raised in a Jewish family, yet another factor setting her outside the circle of the elite social groups.

Schlegel was in a conflicting position between her traditional and yet progressive approach to life. She was traditional in her conservative view of her role as a woman, sacrificing for her husband, filling the role of wife and mother. At the same time she took on a progressive approach as she ventured out of socially and religiously accepted norms when she divorced her husband, Simon Veit, from her prearranged first marriage. She then converted to Catholicism when she married Friedrich Schlegel, a writer, whom she financially supported through her own writings and translations because he was unable to support himself fully through his own.

This research is crucial in helping to uncover the importance of early German women writers, whose works are just as viable and influential as the male writers of that time. Dorothea Schlegel’s participation and role as a writer of the early romantic period have been seldom addressed in the literary world. Often, early women writers published their works under the name of a man; Dorothea Schlegel published under the name of her husband Friedrich Schlegel. He and his brother August are considered prominent writers and contributors to the romantic German literary movement, and both have received significant amounts of research and attention throughout the years. Dorothea Schlegel, who was also a gifted writer, has been overlooked because of the attention her husband and brother-in-law have received.

Through Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Florentine and her novella Camilla, along with her various letters, she has made many overlooked contributions to the romantic literary world. She is one who represents a group of significant women writers who have not received proportional attention to male writers throughout time. Schlegel is one who pushed against the social boundaries in various aspects of her life and has made significant contributions through her writings and translations. There is much that can be gained from rescuing her private literature and making it more readily available to students of Romantic literature. Making my research project available to others is an attempt to draw attention to the significance of her writing in the Romantic context, thus allowing her voice to be more widely heard in the literary world.

I performed the majority of my research with primary and secondary resources available to me at the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library, as well as other libraries accessed through interlibrary loan. I was able to read her novel Florentine, novella Camilla, and various letters. I also discovered a limited number of commentaries written about her works that gave helpful insight. I completed a paper using my research on Dorothea Schlegel for two classes taken during Fall 2001: Germ 498 –German Romanticism and Germ 440 – Outsiders in Literature.

The original plan to accompany my mentor, Professor Cindy Brewer, to do archival research in Germany did not take place due to my Olympic responsibilities during the month of February 2002. However, Professor Brewer specializes in German women’s literature and was a key figure in advising me throughout my research, overseeing the development of my paper and giving me suggestions of how to make my research available to others.

This research project has helped me gain vital research skills which will benefit me for future research projects. It has also given me an opportunity to make a contribution to the German literary world in a small way. Although I have not yet been able to digitize, edit and gloss my findings in order to submit them to the Sophie Website, a digital library of early German women writers, I have made my research findings available on the World Wide Web for others interested in German women authors.

I have designed a website dedicated completely to Dorothea Schlegel with links providing biographical information about Dorothea Schlegel, as well as her father, Moses Mendelssohn, and her husband, Friedrich Schlegel. There is also a link providing an extensive list of further readings for those interested in doing further research on Dorothea Schlegel, including a literary review of some the works that I spent most of my time studying. For the most creative part of this project, I included on the website a link titled Assumed Responses to Various German Romantic Authors from the Perspective of Dorothea Schlegel. These are creative responses I wrote using quotes and ideas from my research of Dorothea Schlegel in response to other German Romantic literary works I have read, as if they might be Dorothea’s own responses. The address to this website is: www.geocities.com/mandibingham.

Although I was unable to make the desired trip to Germany to research German archives, I felt that this research project has been a positive learning experience. I have learned more about in-depth research as well as how to build a website to share research findings with others who may be interested.