7 Apr 2025
Some women were once successful authors like Goethe or Schiller. So why are their names forgotten today? German philologist Anna Axtner-Borsutzky and her team seek out their traces.
Dr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky and her team working in the archives of the Deutsches Theatermuseum in Munich. | © LMU/Florian Generotzky
Dr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky is a lecturer at LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures. She heads the subproject about theater within “Lost in archives. In search of hidden women in the 18th century.” Launched in October 2024, this research project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
You’re leading a project about largely forgotten female playwrights from the period around 1800, some of whom were very well known in their day. Who were these women?
Anna Axtner-Borsutzky: A classic example is Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, whose plays were often staged but who is virtually unknown today. And yet in some of the German communities in America, for example, her work was performed more often than the plays of Goethe or Schiller. This is something I discovered during a research residency on the east coast last year.
Therese von Artner is a figure I find particularly fascinating. She wrote many dramas and was very well connected. In our research, we found rave reviews of her plays. One of them proclaims: “At the preview performance, some of the scenes by the brilliant Therese von Artner […] known under the name Theone […] were such a resounding success that the poet sold her manuscript to Hartleben booksellers for the sum of 300 florins …” This was a wonderful find for us, because it shows that her play was performed and that she could even sell it.
The name of Charlotte von Stein is not entirely forgotten, although she’s mostly mentioned today on account of her friendship with Goethe. Incidentally, this is a form of marginalization that often occurs with female authors from this period – and which it’s easy to fall into oneself. Female authors are not considered in their own right, but in relation to other, mostly male, authors. Charlotte von Stein wrote dramas such as Dido at the same time that Goethe and Schiller were in Weimar. But almost nobody knows her Dido anymore.
The 18th century was the heyday of drama. There is the notion that women didn’t write dramas, but tended toward more sentimental forms of writing, such as novels and letters. But this has long been disprovenDr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky , Head of the subproject about theater within “Lost in archives. In search of hidden women in the 18th century.”
Were these isolated cases?
Not at all. The 18th century was the heyday of drama. This was when the first national stages were established – in Mannheim, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna. There is the notion that women didn’t write dramas, but tended toward more sentimental forms of writing, such as novels and letters. But this has long been disproven – by Anne Fleig, for instance, who found definitive evidence of more than 50 dramas written by women having been staged in the late 18th century. So we find a gender-specific genre attribution that is in fact untenable.
Once so popular, why are these female playwrights unknown today?
This is a question we’re addressing in the project: What were the processes whereby they became invisible? Part of the answer is the self-archiving practice of authors. Goethe is a model for how to manage your literary estate. He personally arranged his estate in such a way that it would be useful later. This was vanishingly rare among female dramatists.
Another contributing factor is collecting and archiving practices after an author’s death. The literary estates of the likes of Kleist, Schiller, and Goethe are collected and systematized in major archives such as the German Literature Archive in Marbach and the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. This is rarely the case for female playwrights of the period. The second part of our project concerns the literary classification of the rediscovered plays.
The 19th century is the founding era of the major collections and national historiography, of the construction of literary titans. This is not a story in which female authors belong, according to the (literary) historians of the time.Dr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky , Head of the subproject about theater within “Lost in archives. In search of hidden women in the 18th century.”
Why are these female authors absent in the large archives? Were they already forgotten when the archives were established? Or were they deliberately omitted?
We need to clarify this in the individual cases. The 19th century is the founding era of the major collections and national historiography, of the construction of literary titans. This is not a story in which female authors belong, according to the (literary) historians of the time.
Partly, this is deliberate omission. It’s also got much to do with so-called ‘quality,’ an attribute that contemporaries denied to female authors – unjustifiably as has since been amply demonstrated. There was a prejudice that women’s writing lacked quality. Even though this is simply untrue in many cases, it leads to the blanket neglect of women’s writing a priori. We repeatedly see this mechanism at play – female playwrights and writers are marginalized and then do not occupy much space when people write the literary history of the time.
How do you go about your research?
We go into archives, read playbills and reviews from the time, search for letters. Either we find materials from the estates of the women themselves or we find information about them in the estates of others. For example, if they exchanged letters with another person – a publisher, say – who kept the correspondence. These are the traces we pursue.
There is a wide variety of cases here. Some women published under their own name. Others used pseudonyms or married and took on a new name. Sometimes we have only initials to go on. As such, it’s not always easy to figure out who wrote a particular piece.
In literary histories, too, you have to look closely to find female names. It’s a question of canonization, whereby certain greats were elevated and made into beacons of literature. Conversely, others were forgotten.Dr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky , Head of the subproject about theater within “Lost in archives. In search of hidden women in the 18th century.”
The Schauspielhaus Graz premiered the drama “Von einem Frauenzimmer” by Christiane Karoline Schlegel in 2024. | © Schauspielhaus Graz/Lex Karelly
What were the consequences of this marginalization of female authors? How did it skew writing on theater in subsequent years?
I myself learned nothing in school and as an undergraduate about women writers from the time around 1800. In literary histories, too, you have to look closely to find female names. It’s a question of canonization, whereby certain greats were elevated and made into beacons of literature. Conversely, others were forgotten.
That being said, how we deal with cultural knowledge has changed a lot over the past decade. There are increasing numbers of literary histories and anthologies that seek to include more women. And although this is often still an active search, it’s very much worth the effort, as it’s the only way to present readers with these other perspectives. Moreover, the works of female authors are equally suitable for literary studies. It’s precisely here that we find innovative styles of writing that could forge new paths in the future.
These dramas are just as suitable for literary investigations and analysis as the conventional canon.
The most important issue is the lack of access. For many female authors, there are no Wikipedia entries or other encyclopedia articles with easy public access.Dr. Anna Axtner-Borsutzky , Head of the subproject about theater within “Lost in archives. In search of hidden women in the 18th century.”
“For me, researching in archives is like a treasure hunt, especially when archives are not systematized, but there are just boxes to rummage around in. You don’t know what you’re looking for, because you don’t know what’s there. Advancing in steps and gradually piecing together the mosaic – this is all part of the process,” says Dr. Anna Axtner-Borszutzky. | © LMU/Florian Generotzky
How do you address these omissions in your teaching?
Last semester, I gave a seminar called “Spotlight on! In search of unseen women of the 18th to 20th centuries.” The students were enthusiastic. Some said it had never even occurred to them that there might have been more female authors. After all, you don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t know it’s there. These teachers of the future want to bring this knowledge with them into their classrooms after they graduate. Processes like these will bring about change. There are loads of excellent female authors. There are also forgotten male authors, to be sure, but the research gap is vaster in the case of female authors.
The most important issue is the lack of access. For many female authors, there are no Wikipedia entries or other encyclopedia articles with easy public access. If we want to read Charlotte von Stein, for example, there’s no physical edition of Dido. It’s been widely digitized, thank God, but if I want to read Dido with my students – and this was an aha moment for my students when they learned this – we can’t go into a bookstore and buy a copy. Rather, we have to painstakingly read the digital copies in old Gothic typeface. This is another obstacle to the play being widely known, as many people are unused to reading this typeface and find it hard going.
"Lost in Archives“ is a collaborative research project that studies hidden women from the 18th century. Teams led by Prof. Isabelle Deflers from University of the Bundeswehr Munich (military literature) and Dr. Marília Jöhnk from Goethe University Frankfurt (literary criticism) are participating in the project in addition to the LMU contingent. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is supporting the project through its Focus on Innovative Women funding program.
The subproject at LMU is about making hidden female playwrights from the period 1770 to 1820 visible again. This will involve bringing out a podcast, devising a traveling exhibition, publishing a graphic novel, and carrying out literary analysis of the plays. A further goal is to edit the rediscovered works for publication.
For anyone who would like to read a work by one of the forgotten authors which has been rescued from obscurity [German only]:
Elise Müller: Die Kostgängerin im Nonnenkloster [The Boarder in the Convent]. With an afterword by Johannes Birgfeld. Published by Werhahn, 2003.