Sophie von La Roche

German novelist

• Born: December 6, 1731
• Birthplace: Kaufbeuren, Bavaria (now in Germany)
• Died: February 18, 1807
• Place of death: Offenbach, Hesse (now in Germany)

La Roche was the first woman to write a German novel and one of the first novelists to use letters as the key means of constructing her narrative. She also translated into German the works of British feminists and intellectuals known as the Bluestockings, thus sharing British feminist ideas with German readers.

Early Life

Sophie von La Roche (lah-ROHSH) was the first child of a well-educated and cultured German physician. She had thirteen brothers and sisters, and like many children of her class, Sophie was educated at home, largely by her mother and in her father’s large library. In 1743, Sophie was engaged to an Italian doctor who did not speak German, so she learned Italian.

Her life changed dramatically in 1748 when her mother died, her engagement ended, and she went to live with her cousins, the Wielands. There she met poet and writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), who became her lifelong friend and literary patron. He was a successful novelist himself. Between 1750 and 1753, Sophie was engaged to Wieland, but following her father’s wishes, she broke off with him to marry a well-placed German government adviser, Georg Michael von La Roche.

Sophie moved to Mainz with her husband, where she assisted in hosting literary evenings that exposed her to the latest in literary, philosophical, and political ideas. Georg encouraged Sophie to read widely and to use her self-taught skills in Italian, French, and English to converse with their guests. In 1768, Georg’s father and patron, Count Stadion, died, and the La Roches were no longer prominent in Mainz society, temporarily. The couple’s two daughters, Maximiliana and Luise, were being educated away from home, so Sophie felt a sense of loss with no children to raise or parties to host. She described herself to friends as lonely, and soon she was being encouraged to take up writing to help her pass her time. This was not an unusual activity for women in the eighteenth century, as writing was considered a good way to spend time and to make money as long as the publications were not scandalous and they fit the time’s ideal of womanhood.

In 1771, Sophie published the first part of her novel in letters, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim; best known as Sternheim), followed in 1772 by a second, shorter part. In 1772, she met the young writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), whom she is reputed to have encouraged to write his first epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), based on a story he told Sophie about unrequited love and death. Just as Sophie was becoming famous, her husband was returned to the Mainz court as an adviser in 1774. She then arranged for her daughter, Maximiliana, to marry a much older and prosperous businessman, Peter Bretano, and the couple had two children, Clemens and Bettina (von Arnim), who were to become prominent writers themselves.

Life’s Work

When Sophie von La Roche published Sternheim, she was capitalizing on the enormous popularity of novels with the German reading public, notably the imitations of the novels of British writer Samuel Richardson. His Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) and Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748) used correspondence to advance the narrative and were seen to offer role models for women readers that parents and pastors could admire. In Richardson’s story, the character Pamela Andrews raises herself from servitude to marriage and motherhood without sacrificing her honor. The character Clarissa stubbornly refuses to accept the marriage her father arranges for her and is severely punished by rape and abandonment; Clarissa then chooses death over further dishonoring her family. For her novel, La Roche borrowed the popular epistolary narrative and some of the sensational elements of Clarissa (including the rape) to balance the overall virtue of her heroine, Lady Sophia, modeled on Pamela.

In Sternheim, the first letters Lady Sophia sends her friend Emilia suggest precise borrowing from Richardson and from La Roche’s own life: Lady Sophia experiences family deaths that change the course of her life, she is admired by both men and women, she has several aggressive suitors, and she speaks and teaches English to her friends. Lady Sophia’s charmingly awkward behavior in mixed company anticipates the success of Fanny Burney (1752-1840), whose heroine in her epistolary novel Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) has to find her way in London society in a journey not without some peril. La Roche balances a number of correspondents, both male and female, and uses her novel to state some bold truths about the social position of women, especially regarding marriage. For instance, Lord Derby writes that while he is attracted to Lady Sophia, he knows he cannot marry her, because her uncle is arranging a marriage for her that will help her uncle win a lawsuit. She also openly portrays male and female friendship, as a tribute to her own with Wieland, who helped her publish the novel anonymously.

Critics have argued that La Roche’s ambition in The History of Lady Sternheim does not wholly match her abilities as a novelist. The critics point out that elements of The History of Lady Sternheim’s plot are unevenly handled, with excessive reliance on circumstances to move the story along; that characters are not fully developed; and that major and minor characters are not always clearly distinguished in their importance to the story. The character of Lady Sophia has been deemed successful, however, because she learns from her mistakes and absorbs information around her that improves her judgment, making her a good role model.

By 1783, with The History of Lady Sternheim in its eighth edition and her success proven, La Roche used her reputation to launch a periodical called Pomona für Teutschlands Tochter (fruits for Germany’s daughter). The periodical title’s spelling of “Teutschlands,” meaning “Germany,” reflects her regional dialect. For the periodical she wrote essays and translated poetry and prose by women writers, especially her much-loved British women writers, to whom Wieland had introduced her in the 1750’s, when they read English books together (including Pamela). Pomona gave La Roche the opportunity to make German readers—mainly women—aware of the conversations British women writers were having in poetry and prose about literature, education, and women’s duties in society—subjects not openly discussed in the 1780’s. As a translator of Bluestocking writings, La Roche protected her reputation, as the words and ideas belonged to others: She merely rendered them into German.

Considering herself an Anglophile, La Roche visited London in 1786. She was delighted to attend the theater and to visit the numerous cultural attractions, including the city’s bookstores. She met Fanny Burney, and in her conversations with British women, she keenly felt that German women, while having physically accomplished a great deal as wives and mothers, were behind their British counterparts intellectually. Indeed, German women’s writing was considered Trivialliteratur (trivial literature) and women’s novels were called Frauenromane (women’s novels), implying that they had little in the way of intellectual or literary merit. However, nearly four thousand women were writing and publishing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across Germany.

Significance

Sophie von La Roche earned her place in literary history with The History of Lady Sternheim and in feminist thought with her translations and essays published in Pomona für Teutschlands Tochter (1783-1784). Her appreciation of English culture and her comments on English society in her letters, diaries, and travel journals reveal how continental Europeans perceived the English in the eighteenth century. At a time when German women were discouraged from writing, La Roche took advantage of her husband’s position in the Mainz court and Wieland’s position in literary circles to break new ground in German fiction and to publish quality translations of feminist poetry and prose.

Bibliography

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997. Discusses La Roche’s visit to London in 1768 and uses excerpts from her letters and diaries as evidence of what she valued in English culture.

Brown, Hilary. “The Reception of the Bluestockings by Eighteenth Century German Women Writers.” Women in German Yearbook (2002): 110-132. Convincingly argues that La Roche shared the feminist ideas of the Bluestockings in her translations for Pomona.

Cocalis, Susan L. “’Around 1800’: Reassessing the Role of German Women Writers in Literary Production of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Women in German Yearbook (1992): 159-177. A review essay that describes the devaluation of German women as writers and explains the historical challenges women faced in bringing their work to press.

Fronius, Helen. “Der Reiche Man und die Arme Frau (The Powerful Man and the Poor Woman): German Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace.” German Life and Letters 56, no. 1 (January, 2003): 1-19. Uses two sets of publishers’ correspondence to trace how women writers navigated the male-dominated publishing world and provides new evidence on the number of women publishing in Germany.

Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher. Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Establishes how The History of Lady Sternheim allowed La Roche to discuss gender issues and how she influenced other women writers.

La Roche, Sophie von. The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim. Translated by Christina Baguss Britt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. An English translation of La Roche’s novel, with useful notes, a historical introduction, and a bibliography.