Project Description
The project "Female Writers in the Varnhagen Collection - Letters, Works, Relations", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Polish National Science Centre (NCN), is dedicated to the quantitative and qualitative indexing, editing and analysis of extensive, often as yet unpublished documents from the Varnhagen Collection held in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. Established by the diplomat and publicist Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785-1858), the husband of the famous Berlin writer and salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771-1833), and continued by his niece Ludmilla Assing (1821-1880), the collection developed into one of the largest and most important autograph collections of the 19th century.
The importance accorded to women writers in this collection is remarkable, also in comparison to other larger collections of the time, and can be understood as a corrective to the representation of cultural and literary history that was for a long time oriented towards male intellectual giants. In addition to well-known names such as Bettine von Arnim, Sophie Mereau-Brentano or Rahel Levin Varnhagen, the collection also includes lesser-known or forgotten women writers who are not usually counted as part of the literary canon, but who were highly regarded among their contemporaries and played an important role in the literary life of the time. Their letters, works and relations are the subject of the project.
The focus is on the Nachlass of the writers Charlotte von Ahlefeld (1777-1849), Helmina von Chézy (1783-1856), Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (1773-1831), Amalie von Helvig (1776-1831), Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858), Fanny Tarnow (1779-1862), Karoline von Woltmann (1782-1847) and Amalie von Voigt (1778-1840). Their lives were interconnected through correspondence and diverse relationships in the literary field. Their sometimes unconventional biographies also make it possible to view these women as cultural mediators between countries and cultures, for example between Germany, France, England and the USA. The selected corpus of manuscripts reflects the diversity of this network of relationships. In addition, the project examines the broader context of the corpus within the Varnhagen Collection with a view to exploring its connection to other relevant collections.
