“Die zukünftige Ehefrau” and “alte Jungfer” in Fanny Lewald’s First Fiction and Autobiography

Celebrations two hundred years after her birth acknowledge Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), a prolific writer, as an early spokesperson for the emancipation of women from restricted social roles. Her autobiography, Meine Lebensgeschichte, published in 1861-62 when she was 50 years old, describes the first 30 years of her life. In it, she details growing up female in a middle-class home in Königsberg and how she was prepared to assume narrowly defined roles of wife, mother, and household manager (Gattin, Mutter, Hausfrau). Marriage in late 18^th and early 19^th century Germany was touted by Joachim Heinrich Campe and others as the only way open to a woman to achieved her feminine purpose and perfection (weibliche Bestimmung und Vollkommenheit). Lewald’s autobiography can be read as a novel of development describing how she waited in vain for an acceptable marriage proposal, but eventually achieved her own liberation by becoming self-supporting as a writer. This study explores the ideal of femininity as articulated by Campe, Lewald’s negotiation of this ideal as described in her autobiography and how the characters in her first piece of fiction interact with the ideal. Lewald’s first fictional piece, a fairy tale entitled “Modernes Mährchen,” was published in 1841. This tale was revised and republished as “Tante Renate” in 1862 after a twenty-year time lapse in which Lewald had become an established author and had married. Both original and revised versions are examined with regard to changes and gender issues, in particular.