Fervor and fiction

This book is about the life and work of a woman totally forgotten for over a century, although she had traveled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Russia, and published five novels, five travel books and memoirs. Therese von Bacheracht (pseud. Therese) was born in 1804 in Stuttgart and died in 1852 in Java. The breadth and depth of her culture she owed to her father and to an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Her acquaintances included Goethe who took an interest in her during her year in Weimar, Franz Liszt, members of the Bonaparte family, Metternich and other statesmen. Prominent among themes in her writings are the injustice suffered by women in Germany and elsewhere, stemming from limited opportunities for education and from a hostile male establishment; secondly, the institution of marriage and thirdly, corruption at the courts of ruling despots in her homeland, with their indifference to the suffering of their subjects, aggravated by conditions in the factories of the industrial revolution. Professor Powell traces the life and environment of Therese, discusses her fiction, reproduces her impressions of contemporary European literature, theater and fine art, but also her ideas on education with her concern for the human condition. Her novels containing psychological studies of women are contemporary, and include references to living writers and composers such as Hahn-Hahn, George Sand, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Strauss. Together with her memoirs they provide information about the fabric of life in nineteenth-century Germany, difficult to find in the "classic" literature. Warm sympathy for her fellow mortals prevails in the life and work of Therese, whose multifarious experiences included an encounter in a slave market in Constantinopole. That she preserved for posterity the letters of Wilhelm von Humboldt to Charlotte Diede is not the least of her achievements.