IN THIS BOOK I have focused on Andreas-Salomé's depictions of independent, intellectual, and creative women muddling through a time and society in which their place was uncertain and their concept of self threatening to both themselves and others. Following in the footsteps of critics such as Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Brigid Haines, Raleigh Whitinger, and Biddy Martin, I have tried to elucidate this author's various attempts to complicate the contemporary definition and regulation of sexual difference and gender in her fiction. Her informed interest in literary, medical, scientific, feminist, philosophical, psychological, and political discourses allows her to recontextualize them in her fiction in ways that expose how the binaries that tend to form the basis of any particular discourse constitute simplifications of immensely complex and irreducible psychological processes. Though one might well call her a disciple of such intellectuals as Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Andreas-Salomé clearly had her own intellectual agenda, and it manifests itself throughout her body of work. For her there was no contradiction in listening to and absorbing the theories of renowned male intellectuals and concomitantly developing her own theories, which often read as refinements of and correctives to theirs. Andreas-Salomé was interested in any discourse that could help her in what I interpret to have been her primary quest, namely to figure out what identity meant in the contemporary moment. Her novels, novellas, and essays ask how issues such as class, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationalism, culture, and location inform both concepts of identity and identity formation itself.