Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. Meine Liebe zu Büchern. Sophie von La Roche als professionelle Schriftstellerin. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008. 251 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8253-5382-7 hardcover, €35.00. Reviewed for the Women in German Newsletter (Issue 111, Spring 2009) by Catherine Grimm, Albion College.

In this 2008 book, preeminent scholar of the social and cultural significance of German women writers, Barbara Becker-Cantarino turns her attention to Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), the celebrated author of Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, as well as numerous other works. As Becker-Cantarino makes clear in her introduction, she does not want to engage in theoretical debates about how La Roche’s texts relate to the aesthetics of Classicism and Romanticism, but rather wishes to employ an historically accurate approach that will reveal the true cultural significance of La Roche’s oeuvre. Her book, as she writes, ”beleuchtet La Roches wichtige Stellung im literarischen Feld ihrer Zeit” (7).

After the introduction follow five chapters that focus chronologically on La Roche’s development as a woman writer in a society that was careful to differentiate what was deemed acceptable or unacceptable for women. In chapter one Becker-Cantarino describes how societal suspicions during the 18th century concerning women as readers, as well as women’s education, led to the ideal of a well-educated woman becoming eclipsed by the ideal of an emotional, sensitive woman. She shows how La Roche, who at an early age had been given free access to her father’s extensive library, was implicated in these debates yet navigated them successfully in the sense that, while she never lost sight of her own desire for knowledge and love of reading, she always framed these proclivities in a way that was deemed acceptable by 18th century society.

The second chapter traces in great detail the fascinating and at times confounding relationship Sophie von La Roche had with the famous Enlightenment author Christoph Martin Wieland. Becker-Cantarino offers an insightful analysis of the life-long correspondence between the two writers, who early on were even engaged for a short time. The image of Wieland that emerges is decidedly unflattering—while early on in the relationship he used the heightened emotional language of their correspondence as inspiration for his own poetry without ever really being serious about their relationship (Becker-Cantarino calls it his “empfindsames Liebesspiel” p. 46), after Sophie’s marriage to George La Roche, Wieland’s own self-centeredness emerges as he writes to her about his erotic feelings for other women. Becker-Cantarino outlines Wieland’s overbearing and condescending editorial practices as he oversaw the publication of La Roche’s first novel, Die Geschichte des Fräulein von Sternheim, as well as the growing distance between the two, mainly on his part, as La Roche became more autonomous as a writer, while simultaneously suffering social decline.  During the 1790s he even refused her plea to be taken in just as Frankfurt was about to be occupied by the French, and when she did finally visit him much later on in Weimar, he became infatuated with her daughter, Sophie Brentano, and was irritated by her presence.

Becker-Cantarino also addresses how La Roche’s relationship to her writing changed as her social standing became less stable. On the one hand, La Roche realized that she needed to write in order to make money, yet she had to be careful not to publicly acknowledge that fact, since to do so would have meant violating the parameters within which most women lived their lives during the last decade of the 18th century. 

Chapter three begins with a detailed and nuanced analysis of La Roche’s Sternheim novel, and suggests that at the end of that novel patriarchal society has dissolved into a quasi-utopian world inhabited mainly by women. (“Die feudale, patriarchale Gesellschaft ist wie traumhaft aufgeweicht und durchdrungen von der in Sophie Sternheim verkörperten ‚weiblichen‘ Welt“ 103).  Becker-Cantarino proceeds to describe the content and cultural significance of Sophie von La Roche’s later works in an informative and entertaining manner. She traces the subtle changes in La Roche’s work that indicate her growing dissatisfaction with the fact that women were naturally expected to find fulfillment and contentment in making others (predominantly men and their own families) happy: “La Roche kritisierte den übersteigerten Tugendanspruch der Zeit, dass Frauen das eigene Glück im Glücklichmachen anderer suchen sollten und hinterfragte nun diesen Anspruch” (119). 

Becker-Cantarino does an excellent job of making it clear how much more there is to La Roche’s oeuvre than the Sternheim novel. Her works proved to be exceptionally popular with her predominantly female readership, in part because of an eighteenth-century predilection for identificatory reading.  La Roche took advantage of her popularity when she began publishing her own literary journal in 1783: Pomona (für Teutschlands Töchter). La Roche’s own interest in pursuing knowledge and educating women was at the heart of this project, as Becker-Cantarino makes clear. Even after she stopped publishing Pomona La Roche continued writing and her works became more openly advice-driven and less purely fictional. These later works (including Briefe an Lina and the sequel Briefe an Lina als Mutter) were full of practical knowledge concerning the running of a household, but they also emphasized reading and the acquisition of knowledge as desirable pursuits for women. The second half of the fourth chapter describes Sophie von La Roche’s travels through Europe as well as her collected writings about these travels. Becker-Cantarino offers lively descriptions of these works, which still seemed to find a wide readership among the cultural elites of German-speaking Europe.
The final chapter offers insight into the financially more modest living situation of the older, widowed La Roche in Offenbach, where she still managed to write and correspond until her death in 1807. Becker-Cantarino describes how La Roche was able to keep her fictional work fresh by remaining interested in the literary productions of a younger generation of relatives and friends. Karoline von Günderrode had her Geschichte eines Brahminen published in La Roche’s penultimate work Herbsttage and, as Becker-Cantarino points out there are a number of parallels in the work and personality of La Roche and her granddaughter Bettina Brentano von Arnim.

This easy to read and informative work represents an important contribution to previous scholarly work on La Roche in that it adds nuance to what seems to be still a rather one-sided and clichéd understanding of this colorful and complex eighteenth-century personality. The book will be of interest to anyone desiring to learn more about the significant cultural contributions of one of the earliest best-selling female authors in German-speaking Europe.