THE NAKED FIGURE on the paperback edition of Ulrike Draesner’s 2002 novel Mitgift (literally: Dowry) announces that this is a text dealing with gendered bodies, narratives and images of physicality, and ways of seeing. Turning away from the camera toward an open door, and cropped at the shoulders and knees, the figure is illuminated from behind by a window and is, on second glance at least, relatively androgynous. Mitgift explores the embodiedness of individuals and their experience through the central relationship between Aloe, an art historian, and astrophysicist Lukas, who meet while studying at Oxford. The course of their relationship is in turn intertwined with the relationship between Aloe, who develops anorexia, and her sister Anita, born a hermaphrodite. The novel opens with a mystery — why is Aloe now the guardian of Anita’s son? But the dramatic revelation, when it finally comes, is underplayed: Anita is killed in a murder-suicide by her husband after she decides to transition (back) to a male body.

This chapter focuses on Mitgift rather than more recent publications because, though written after Lichtpause (Light break, 1998), it marks her first major novel, one that has only belatedly gained recognition. More importantly, Mitgift also sets out and distils the thematic interests that recur in subsequent texts; namely, bodies, relationships, gender, sex, and reproduction. The novel also demonstrates Draesner’s continuing exploration of language and competing discourses of understanding, represented most notably by science in the form of astrophysics; the text displays a self-aware interest in critical theory and an informed interrogation of notions of “women’s writing.”

Draesner wrote a doctorate on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival before giving up academic work for writing. Her writing is both playful and intellectual. She published the first of several volumes of poetry in 1995 and to date her poems have met with a wider reception in academic criticism than her prose; her first novel Lichtpause is now out of print. She has written short stories, including the collections Hot Dogs (2004) and Richtig liegen (2011), and a novel about the Munich Olympics hostage crisis and its after-effects, Spiele (Games, 2005); she also translates (mostly poetry) from English. In Vorliebe (Preference, 2010), astrophysicist Harriet comes back into contact with her first love Peter, a priest, after Harriet’s partner Ash accidentally knocks down Peter’s wife.