WHEN SCHOLARS WENT SEARCHING for the German Jane Austen or the German Madame de Sévigné—that is, for a woman writer of great merit, they found not one but hundreds of potential candidates. German women novelists wrote and published prodigiously around 1800. Finding the works of female authors is now easier because of digital technologies, reprints such as the Olms Press Frühe Frauenliteratur in Deutschland (Early Women's Literature in Germany), female-authored texts on zeno.org, Spiegel's Gutenberg web pages, and other internet sites. Twenty-first-century readers have access to a long list of potential classics written by women, which is exciting in its breadth but messy in its organization. Such chaos can have advantages over a rigid literary canon that is blind to its own prejudices and the way in which it privileges male artists. In college-level courses, it is not feasible to add works without removing others; in scholarship, however, it is possible to swell the numbers of entries in a heuristic literary canon and accept a “chaotic and diverse” “literary past.” Reprints that reproduce the antiquated German script and, more accessibly, the open-access and easily legible web versions of eighteenth-century texts are strong indications that the desired chaos of a diverse literary past is being recovered.

In each of the six chapters in this volume I investigate a novel that was written in the German language, appeared in print around 1800, and was authored by a woman. While adding an equal number of women authors to men would correct the statistical imbalance in the literary canon, it would offer little beyond this. Instead, I argue that any newly added works by women should be carefully curated and included because of the value they offer in their own right. The novels featured in this study have been chosen because they are beautiful, poignant, engaging, and well-crafted.