Fervor and fiction

This book is about the life and work of a woman totally forgotten for over a century, although she had traveled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Russia, and published five novels, five travel books and memoirs. Therese von Bacheracht (pseud. Therese) was born in 1804 in Stuttgart and died in 1852 in Java. The breadth and depth of her culture she owed to her father and to an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Her acquaintances included Goethe who took an interest in her during her year in Weimar, Franz Liszt, members of the Bonaparte family, Metternich and other statesmen. Prominent among themes in her writings are the injustice suffered by women in Germany and elsewhere, stemming from limited opportunities for education and from a hostile male establishment; secondly, the institution of marriage and thirdly, corruption at the courts of ruling despots in her homeland, with their indifference to the suffering of their subjects, aggravated by conditions in the factories of the industrial revolution. Professor Powell traces the life and environment of Therese, discusses her fiction, reproduces her impressions of contemporary European literature, theater and fine art, but also her