Although I didn't realize it at the time, this book had its beginnings on or around November 9, 1989, in West Berlin. A few days earlier I had completed work on a study of the German Bildungsroman, which focused on canonical texts by such authors as Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, and Hoffmann. While completing this project I had become increasingly curious about women writers in the “Age of Goethe.” Did they exist? (I had certainly never heard about them in graduate school.) If so, why had they been forgotten? And were novels by German women anything like the canonical Bildungsromane by men? With these questions in mind I began to read and reread Sophie von LaRoche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim [The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim] (1771). LaRoche's work soon sent me back to Richardson and Rousseau, and led me on to German women writers of the next generation, including Therese Huber, Sophie Mereau, Friederike Helene Unger, and Caroline von Wolzogen. The novels were scattered throughout the libraries of the still-divided city, and in January, 1990, I was able to take advantage of a new law that allowed German nationals and other residents of West Berlin to travel without a visa and without the compulsory monetary exchange into what was still the German Democratic Republic. Thus one grey morning found me boarding the S-Bahn to read the copy of Elisa oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte [Elisa or Woman As She Should Be] (1795) housed in the Staatsbibliothek in the heart of East Berlin.