Fraulein Nette’s Brief Summer

English sample translation available
Düsseldorfer Literature Prize 2019

A young poetess who refuses to toe the line and a disastrous emotional entanglement – Karen Duve’s mercilessly realistic account of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s life story

Twenty-three years old, fierce, stubborn and sassy, Fräulein Nette is the black sheep that refuses to fit in with the herd of her aristocratic relatives. While her aunts and cousins sit dutifully by the fireplace embroidering, she ventures into the marl pits armed with a pickaxe to quarry for minerals. The hems of her dresses are basically perpetually soiled. But the worst thing is her sharp tongue. When her uncle August’s artist friends come to Bökerhof to talk about art and politics, she weighs in, uninvited. The mere sight of her sends Wilhelm Grimm, on whom she has bestowed the nickname “Unwill,” into a panic. She is an enfant terrible – though apparently not in everyone’s eyes. Heinrich Straube, the brilliantly eccentric heart of the Göttingen guild of poets, for one, finds his best friend’s niece extremely compelling. And his overtures to her in the family greenhouse remain anything but unreciprocated. But he isn’t the only one. What ensues is a romantic catastrophe with a familial conflagration.