The Novels By Eugenie John, alias E. Marlitt (1825–87), are central to the tradition of the nineteenth-century German bestseller. They were composed with the purpose of commercial success and were serialized in Ernst Keil’s Die Gartenlaube—Germany’s most widely read illustrated family weekly. Keil subsequently published the novels in volume form in large print runs and numerous editions, bringing their previously impecunious author financial prosperity. The remarkable popularity of Marlitt’s novels contributed significantly to the rapid increase in the circulation of Keil’s weekly from 142,000 in 1866, the year her first novel Goldelse (Gold Elsie) was serialized, to 382,000 in 1875. The actual readership was certainly much larger since the lower middle classes and working classes were increasingly becoming literate, and many members of a household—including the domestic staff—would read the family copy, so that Marlitt’s novels found readers across the age spectrum. Judging by Count Pückler-Muskau’s veneration for Marlitt, the readership also included members of the aristocracy. The weekly was available in cafés and libraries, and one estimate extends the total number of readers to 5 million. The novels were translated into most European and several non-European languages, often as they appeared in serial form. They inspired younger German writers such as Ludwig Ganghofer and Hedwig Courths-Mahler to emulate Marlitt’s recipes for success, and they were adapted for the stage and screen.

Marlitt’s communicative success is in inverse proportion to her literary reputation. In the course of the twentieth century, her romantic plots appeared increasingly old-fashioned, and the erstwhile popularity of her novels—always to some degree suspect—became proof of their literary worthlessness. In the 1970s, her work commanded some interest as epitomizing the category of “Trivialliteratur” (a term championed by politically engaged critics as a supposedly neutral tool of sociological analysis) and served to highlight the dangers of allowing the masses to read conservative trash. A rather more open-minded process of reevaluation got underway somewhat tentatively in the 1990s.

Marlitt’s writing career only began in her forties, and she left few theoretical comments about her work. A preface she dedicated to Ernst Keil introducing her third novel Reichsgräfin Gisela offers the most extended comment on her poetics.