About me and my project

“Es war einmal”: the revitalization of nineteenth-century German women writers’ fairy tales

I'm a third-year Oxford student of English and German, and I've recently moved to Munich for my year abroad. Looking for something to fill the cold German winter nights (other than  Glühwein), I've decided to translate some fairytales. But the Brothers Grimm, as great as they are, have received enough attention, I think anyway. So this blog is dedicated to fairy tales written by some far less well-known women writers.

Es war einmal… Once upon a time, over four hundred women published fairy tales in the nineteenth century in Germany alone, yet now we think of the fairy tale as a male-dominated genre, led by Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, Hans Christian Andersen and other men.

My project aims to recover and revitalize the lost voices of the many German women writing fairy tales in the nineteenth century, who used the genre as a subversive vehicle for critique of patriarchal values and conventions, such as the importance of marriage and the denial of education to women. I aim to recover these women’s voices by translating up to six previously untranslated fairy tales and circulating my translations via this blog.

These tales (collected in the original German by Shawn Jarvis in the anthology Im Reich der Wünsche [2012] but not yet translated into English) are: Friederike Helene Unger’s “Prinzessin Gräcula: Ein Märchen” (1804); Charlotte von Ahlefeld’s “Die Nymphe des Reins” (1812); Louise Brachmann’s “Das Reich der Wünsche. Märchen” (1813); Karoline Stahl’s “ ‘Der verzauberte Prinz. Nach einer lettischen Volkssage” (1816); Benedikte Naubert’s “Libelle. Romantische Erzählung” (1817); and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s “Brautwahl” (1892).

I am greatly indebted to Professor Shawn Jarvis, who spent the best part of twenty years creating these two anthologies of fairy tales to bring greater attention to women writers. She has kindly allowed me to take on this project which I hope is inspired by similar motives to her own.
I hope my project will help these German women writers get the critical attention they deserve.

I shall leave you with Jarvis’ words that so piqued my interest in this field: 

“Es sind keine schweigsamen, anpassungs- und aufopferungsbereiten Märchenheldinnen und -autorinnen mehr, mit denen wir es hier zu tun haben. Sie ergreifen das Wort und wollen gehört werden. Hören wir ihnen zu.” 

Shawn Jarvis, ‘Nachwort’, Im Reich der Wünsche, p. 332

In English, this quote goes something like this:

"It's no longer silent, compliant and self-sacrificing fairy tale heroines that we're dealing with here. They speak up and want to be heard. So let's listen to them."