From A Good Family (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Upon publication in 1895, Gabriele Reuter's From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie) became something of a cultural event, making its author one of Germany's most talked-about women of letters. Set in the first two decades of the Second German Reich, this story of a Prussian bureaucrat's daughter caught between conformity and rebellion struck at the core of the class that upheld the empire, revealing the hypocrisy and misery at the very heart of the bourgeois family. It recorded the conflicted and ultimately interminable adolescence of a middle-class girl who failed to fulfill the destiny prescribed for her by her gender and class, a young woman who, despite an incipient high-spiritedness and independence of mind, internalized the attitudes of her culture to the point of lethal self-censorship.