THIS EXCITING and comprehensive anthology -- the first anthology of German women's fairy tales in English -- presents a variety of published and archival fairy tales from 1780 to 1900. The authors of these stories used fairy tales to explain their own lives, to teach children, to examine history, and to critique society and the status quo. Powerful and conflicted females are queens, girls on quests, mothers, daughters, magical wisewomen, and midwives to the fairies; they love, hate, murder, save children, fight tyranny, overcome cannibals, and rescue the working poor.

Jeannine Blackwell's introduction places the tales in their historical, social, and critical context, and Shawn C. Jarvis's afterword presents a thematic analysis of the texts and approaches to reading them in conjunction with other European and American tales.

"Bitter Healing" is the first anthology of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German women's writing in English translation. It goes far toward filling a major gap in literary history by recovering for a wide audience the works of women who were as famous during their lifetime as Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. Like those men, they wrote in the early modern period spanning the transition from early Enlightenment to Romanticism.

Edited by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, this collection assembles little-known writings by fifteen authors from various social classes, religious backgrounds, and political persuasions. They include the forgotten pietist theologian Johanna Eleonore Petersen, the radical social reformer Bettina von Arnim, the outspoken peasant's daughter Anna Luisa Karsch, the aristocrats Annette von Droste-Hulshoff and Karoline von Gunderrode, and the conservative monarchist Sophie von La Roche, among others. Their autobriographies and letters, "moral" and not so moral tales, lyrical and protest poems, plays, and fairy tales deal with religious crisis, family conflict, and harmony, mothers and daughters, wise women, romance and pain and the healing power of love, self-understanding, escape, and the magical and humorous. The variety and quality of the pieces testify to the creativity of women writers during this first peak of literary activity in Germany, the so-called Age of Goethe.

The editors have provided a short biography and bibliography for each writer.