BECAUSE OF HER ASSOCIATIONS, correspondence, and collaboration with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) has always been of interest to German literary scholars. Until the mid- to late 1980s scholarship on her was dominated by biographical studies inspired by a fascination with the great literary and cultural giants she befriended rather than by curiosity about the woman herself and her literary works. In assessing the need for Rudolph Binion's extensive study Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple in the late sixties, for example, Walter Kaufmann pointed to the importance, above all, of her “successive friendships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.” In 1984 Angela Livingstone similarly assumed that her contemporary readership's interest in Andreas- Salomé would center on her subject's “acquaintance with … influential persons.” Early biographers such as Peters, Binion, and Livingstone typically acknowledge Andreas-Salomé's intellectual deftness, deferring to the high regard in which her well-known modernist contemporaries held her, but write off her literary works as veiled recastings of her own experience, as essayistic, and thus lacking in artistic merit.

Beginning in the 1980s, a series of German biographies written almost exclusively by women sought to redress the one-sided focus of their predecessors and shed new light on elements of Andreas-Salomé's life that had previously been ignored: her own intellectual endeavors, long term and intimate relationships with less famous men (Paul Rée and Friedrich Pineles), her connections to women (Frieda von Bülow and Helene Klingenberg), and her position vis-à-vis the German women's movement.