Gabriele Reuter

Gabriele Reuter (8 February 1859 – 16 November 1941) was a German writer.

Gabriele Reuter, who was widely read in her lifetime though now is almost forgotten, was known for her novel From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie, 1895), subtitled "the Passion of a Girl", which described a typical young woman of the Wilhelmine era. Other bestsellers were her novels Ellen of the Meadows (Ellen von der Weiden, 1900), the short story collection Women's Souls (Frauenseelen, 1901) and the novel The Americans (Der Amerikaner, 1907).

Biography

Gabriele Reuter was born on 8 February 1859 in Alexandria (then part of the Egypt Eyalet), where her father was an international merchant in the textile trade sector. She was a great-granddaughter of the poet Philippine Engelhard. She spent her childhood partly with her mother's relatives in Dessau (1864–69), partly in Alexandria (1869–72). After the family's return to Germany in 1872, her father died. Reuter attended finishing school for a year, but then the family lost its entire fortune, due to the general recession in the international trading system and fraud in the dissolution of her father's business, and they moved to a small apartment in Neuhaldensleben.

The responsibility for younger brothers and her increasingly depressive mother led to Gabriele Reuter becoming unusually independent at an early age. The financial problems also led to her, as a young woman, using her writing talent as a source of income. In 1875/76 her first literary publications appeared in local newspapers. These were followed by conventionally written novels with an exotic flavour. The money Reuter earned from these publications funded the family move to Weimar in 1879, where she tried to establish herself as a young writer. Toward the end of the 1880s or early in the 1890s, she first travelled independently to Berlin, Vienna and Munich, to various writers conferences, and made acquaintance with other artists of the time, among them the anarchist and poet John Henry Mackay, with whom she had a long-standing friendship, and Henrik Ibsen.