Green calf binding with brown title plate, gilt banding, decoration and title on the spine. Unusual embossed centre panel with gilt edge decoration on the boards.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

• Note: This book carries the £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.

This is often perceived as being the best of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s writings. Without doubt the book is well housed in an original & collector’s binding. 

Caroline Philippine von Briest (better known as Caroline de la Motte Fouqué; 7 October 1773 – 20 July 1831) was one of the most prolific German women writers of the Romantic period. She wrote novels, short stories, fairy tales, as well as essays, on Greek mythology, on the history of fashion, and travelogs. Her numerous works gained her a high degree of celebrity.

Briest first married Friedrich Ehrenreich Adolf Ludwig Rochus von Rochow (1770–1799), a young officer, who possessed an estate in the neighbourhood, and was attached to a regiment quartered at Potsdam. None of her work during this period was published. Rochow became a gambler and the marriage deteriorated until his wife returned home to her father at Nennhausen with her children, two sons, including Gustav von Rochow, who became Prussian Minister of the Interior and Minister of State, and an illegitimate daughter. She divorced Rochow in 1798 (1799 is also mentioned); he died by suicide in 1799. She married writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué in 1803. It was a second marriage for both. Together they had one daughter, Marie Luise Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (1803–1864). Fouqué retired from the army with claims of poor health and lived at the Nennhausen estate, publishing his first book in 1804; her first book was published two years later.

Several of Briest’s novels, her Letters as to the Purpose and Tendency of Female Culture (Berlin, 1811), as well as her Letters on Greek Mythology (Berlin, 1812), are of note. Some of her narrative poems are distinguished for their insight into matters of the human, particularly the feminine, heart.

Regarding the literary quality of her works, Arno Schmidt in his authoritative biography of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, quotes E. T. A. Hoffmann as follows: “In the afternoon to see Frau Fouqué who bored and displeased me terribly by reading from one of her very bad novels” (30 January 1815) – followed by a second similarly dismissive statement. Schmidt continues by commenting: “After having read ten of her books I do have to agree with him; the best among them are the novels Roderich and the tale Der Delphin, although they do follow well-known models very closely; in addition, some pieces in her books, for example the poems in Frau des Falkenstein, were not written by her but by her husband.”  She wrote approximately twenty novels and sixty stories, as well as poems, theoretical tracts and cultural historical essays; there were also romances and comedies. She sought anonymity for some of her work by referring to herself as “author of the Roderich novels”, or using the pseudonym “Serena”.

Drei Mährchen (1806), Feodora (1814), Frauenliebe (1818) and Die graue Maske (1829) are some of her works with Beytrag zur Geschichte der Zeit (1829/30) considered her most important. Her work has been criticized for abandoning her originality in favour of imitating Motte Fouque’s style, hoping to share in his popularity. Her writings continued until 1829 with her last publication, Resignation. She died at Nennhausen in 1831, aged 57. Her letters and short essays were collected after her death under the title “The Writing Table, or Old Times and New” (Cologne, 1833).