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6 E. Marlitt’s Secondary Characters as Models and Mentors

E. Marlitt populates her romance fiction with educated, employable, liberal-minded, and self-determined young women. Her challenge to established gender codes of the nineteenth-century bourgeois culture clearly resonated with her contemporaries, as her vast readership extended throughout Europe to America and even to Asia. By what rationale could the author introduce young girls with such strong emancipatory images, moral resilience, and self-confidence? The meager factual knowledge available concerning the author’s own life suggests parallels with the fictional characterizations she develops. Marlitt’s intellectual development and hence her career are unthinkable without the financial as well as emotional support, encouragement, and mentoring she enjoyed under the guidance of Princess Mathilde von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. Her aristocratic host Frau von Huber and her daughters treated her as a family member during her operatic training in Vienna. With the exception of the debut novel Goldelse, each and every narrative configuration features a lonely or oppressed protagonist who finds her path to individuation via the aid of one or more “surrogate” parental guides. Invariably single, the mentor provides a support system of worldly experience and mature perspectives to model independence to these inexperienced young people. These secondary characters enhance realism, as a nineteenth-century reader could not expect a naïve protagonist to negotiate successfully without sustained support or guidance the many social and psychological hardships these novels project.

Mentoring is of particular interest within this study, for, as role models, these secondary...