This book surveys novels by German women over the one-hundred-year period that stretches from the beginnings of a national literature to the founding of a nation-state. Domestic fiction concentrates on traditionally feminine concerns of romance, marriage, and family. In doing so, however, it also addresses matters of public concern otherwise restricted to men: romantic entanglements almost invariably turn on questions of class and money, while depictions of the family address relations between rulers and the people at the level of the state. The novels examined are thus both reflections on private life and commentaries on public politics. They introduce women's voices into a patriarchal state and its literature, and in this sense they are domestic fictions in the fatherland.

My work presupposes a number of insights that have become axiomatic in recent years: that sexual difference and the family are cultural constructs subject to historical change; that the emergence of the middle class in the eighteenth century was directly tied to new attitudes toward the family; that the class-specific sexual revolution coincided with the birth of modern nationalism; that political conflicts can take place in the battle for cultural hegemony as well as on the barricades; and that the novel was a central site in the middle-class struggle for power. I will argue that we must view the history of the German novel in the context of both the history of sexuality and the rise of German nationalism, and – most important – that often-marginalized or -trivialized novels by German women played a central role in shaping attitudes toward class, gender, and the nation.