Translator’s Introduction

As Some Locals told her during her journey to Switzerland in 1784, Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807) was the first German woman they had seen on the valley glacier Mer de Glace near Chamonix. For her experiences in the Swiss Alps during the summer of 1784, La Roche, at that time already a well-known writer, should be regarded as a dual pioneer in both women’s mountaineering and women’s mountaineering literature for documenting her experiences in a diary published in 1787. La Roche, the daughter of a doctor, was born in Kaufbeuren/Allgäu and was educated in an unusually versatile fashion for an eighteenth-century girl. According to her autobiography, La Roche was able to read at the age of three and had already read the Bible at the age of five. As a young girl she was taught French, history, astronomy, piano playing, drawing, dancing, and home economics. The gifted child grew up in a Protestant milieu and received an education marked equally by enlightened rationality and piety, which later influenced her writings. In 1750, she met her cousin and first fiancé, the future poet and writer Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), who encouraged her to read the work of such contemporary literary luminaries as Albrecht von Haller, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Friedrich von Hagedorn, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Furthermore, Wieland opened her eyes to broader European literature of the period—for instance, to Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels—and he supported her early literary attempts. But her relationship to Wieland turned out to resemble more a poetic partnership than a true premarital engagement, so in 1753 she entered into a marriage of convenience with the government official and statesman, Georg Michael Frank von Roche, through whom she became initiated into the world of nobility.

La Roche’s writing career began relatively late. With the publication of her epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 1771), she became one of the first German women to achieve widespread European acclaim as a writer. Her novel, which accorded passion a place alongside rationalism and virtue, was a literary sensation in her time and is now considered a milestone in the women’s emancipation movement. Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim was published anonymously by Wieland, who defended women’s authorship in the editor’s preface to the book.