Women in Histories of Literature at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

Given the current interest in writing by women, it is worth noting that a hundred years ago the proportion of women to men listed in histories of German literature was far higher than it is today. To take a couple of random examples from the end of the nineteenth century, the eleven-hundred page Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur by the Austrian Otto Leixner appeared in a second edition in 1892 and mentioned the works of forty-six female writers in the nineteenth century. A few years later, in 1896, Konig's highly successful Deutsche Litteraturgeschichte, of approximately the same length, appeared in a twenty-fifth (jubilee) edition and mentioned forty-two female writers. The overlap, however, is not that large. Leixner omits twenty of those women mentioned by Konig, but he includes twenty-five that Konig does not have, the difference being perhaps in part accounted for by a degree of Austrian and German bias. Together, then, these two historians, both of whom began to produce works on literary history around 1880, discuss in the 1890s the works of sixty-seven women in nineteenth-century German literature. That this is not something new is shown by Karl von Gerstenberg's short (180-page) Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, published a generation earlier (1868); he included twenty of those twenty-nine female writers born before 1828. In the early years of the twentieth century (1909), in the Syllabus of Lectures on the Outlines of German Literature, published for the benefit of students at the University of Toronto, Lewis E. Homing listed at the turn of the century (1885-1905) in lyric poetry seven men and five women and in the novel seven men and nine women. In contemporary poetry and prose at least, male and female writers had equal billing. Women did not appear, however, as dramatists. The number of women listed is not in itself surprising. Unexpected is the fact that the vast majority of them are completely unknown today. They vanished, along with so many others, almost without trace around the turn of the century. This study is limited to those born in 1770 or later, which reduces the number given above to sixty-two. If one looks, for example, at Richard Meyer's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, a work of 664