BIOGRAPHIES

Blackwell, Jeanine, and Susanne Zantop. “Sophie von La Roche.” In Bitter Healing: German Women Writers. From 1700 to 1830: An Anthology, edited by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, pp. 149-54. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Sketches Sophie von La Roche's life and mentions many of her works.

Craig, Charlotte M. “Heritage and Elective Affinity: Bettina Arnim's Surrogate Mother and The Eternal Feminine.” Germanic Notes 16, no. 4 (1985): 54-57.

Discusses La Roche's influence on her granddaughter, author Bettina Arnim, and explores the younger writer's development in the wake of La Roche's success and her influential circle of literati, including Goethe and Wieland.

Lange, Victor. “Visitors to Lake Oneida: An Account of the Background of Sophie von La Roche's Novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida.” Symposium 2, no. 1 (November 1948): 48-78.

Discusses La Roche's son, Fritz, and considers his experiences in America as the impetus for La Roche's novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida.

Mielke, Andreas. “Sophie La Roche: A Pioneering Novelist.” Modern Language Studies 18, no. 1 (winter 1988): 112-19.

A brief decade-by-decade examination of Sophie von La Roche's life, with a focus on her engagement to and long-time friendship with Christoph Martin Wieland.

CRITICISM

Alliston, April. “Of Haunted Highlands: Mapping a Geography of Gender in the Margins of Europe.” In Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, edited by Gregory Maertz, pp. 55-78. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Outlines the plots of three post-Enlightenment works by women writers including La Roche, asserting that Scotland is used as a place for the domestication of femininity through the suffering of feminine virtue.

Craig, Charlotte. “Sophie La Roche's Enlightened Anglophilia.” Germanic Notes 8, no. 1/4 (1977): 34-40.

Examines La Roche's interest in “everything English,” and demonstrates how this personal penchant is displayed in her first novel, History of Miss Sophie Sternheim.

Petschauer, Peter. “Christina Dorothea Leporin (Erxleben), Sophia (Gutermann) von La Roche, and Angelika Kauffman: Background and Dilemmas of Independence.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture: Vol. 15, edited by O. M. Brack, Jr., pp. 127-43. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Discusses the experiences of three famous women, including La Roche, to explain how they attained independence when most eighteenth-century women remained dependent upon men and the patriarchal society.

Additional coverage of La Roche's life and career is contained in the following source published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 94.