A Modern Woman

'The luxury, the royal privilege of the free to go maskless, provokes mighty thunderstorms in the realm of the unfree.' This collection presents ten stories and eight poems by Austrian-born writer Maria Janitschek (1859-1927), none of which have been translated into English before. The chosen works reflect the emancipatory aspect of her vast oeuvre and her psychologically profound perspectives on sex and society. Entering the literary world as a poet in the 1880s, at the dawn of Nietzschean individualism, Janitschek's courage to overstep societal constraints won her great respect. Even her boldest poems, such as 'A Modern Woman' - in which a woman challenges her abuser to a duel - or the anti-natal 'A Mother's Love', did not cause moral outrage, but added to her critical acclaim. Her forceful blank verse and daring subject matter established her as the 'poet of the emancipation era'. Her most successful prose collections, Of Woman (1896) and The New Eve (1902), were counted as significant contributions to the emerging field of sexual psychology. Upon its release, Of Woman was termed 'the first German book which no man could have written'. Unlike her poetry, however, her candid prose met with severe moral backlash. She was denounced as 'the poetess of hysteria', accused of tearing 'through language as a girl rips her bodice, the better to breathe', of venturing too far into 'the lowlands of animalistic love'. Yet throughout the heated debates of the fin de siècle about what should define womanhood and women's writing, Janitschek refused to conform to social pressure and cultivated a genuine interest in the psychology of the individual. This exploration of Janitschek's remarkable influence on German literature and the individualistic aspect of her work, alongside long-overdue translations, will help restore her to her well-deserved place in the canon of fin-de-siècle writers.