"The mix of famous and obscure writers should offer something to both academic and popular taste: altogether the series seems admirable in its aims and in its execution."
--London Times

"Reveal[s] the audacious diversity of women's imaginations before feminism."
--The Oberserver

"Relates the sufferings of a superlatively virtuous heroine victimized by a sadistic libertine lover and worldly relatives. Its expressive delineation of feelings, particularly the delicate sensitivity of the heroine, introduced the sentimental novel into Germany and inspired Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
--Belles Lettres

Sophie von La Roche (1731-1807) is the most famous German 18th-century woman writer, and this is her best known novel. It is also the first novel by a German woman to appear in print. A psychologically intense drama of the struggle of a young country woman to live virtuously in the face of the malevolent intrigues of family, friends, and lovers, it became an icon for young writers of the `Sturm und Drang' generation of the late 18th-century. Goethe admired it and wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther under its influence. With its message of the triumph of truth and virtue over self-love, this book stands as one of the great works of the Age of Sentiment.