The chasteness of Schubert's relationships with women was of a piece with fabrications of the composer that emphasized his shyness or indecision, traits that for decades had buttressed notions of his Mädchencharakter. Certainly the reception of this image was common in Austria, where local traditions and the familiarity of language made the composer's works, especially his Lieder, easily accessible. Also, the symbolic treatment of his music in an imagined setting, whether written or visual, was comprehensible to an audience that remained largely circumscribed by a shared culture, at least through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, an early pictorial rendering such as the 1846 cartoon from the Wiener Theaterzeitung is exceptional visual evidence of a localized phenomenon resulting from Schubert's hitherto modest reputation. Yet a measure of both the durability and the influence of this gendered image of the composer is that, as Schubert's music gained in esteem beyond the empire's borders, it was precisely this characterization that leeched into the popular consciousness. Of course, the taste among a significant portion of the public for a certain kind of sentimental entertainment contributed to the dissemination of a story like that by Elise Polko in both its original German and its subsequent English translation. Quite apart from the voguish prevalence of such stories, the saccharine and cloying nature of the narratives in which Schubert actually appeared as a character may help to account for the absence of any figure of significant literary stature among their authors.