David Prashker's Book Of Days: June 14

1829

Therese, or probably Theresa Heyne, known by her married name as Therese Huber, born in Göttingen on May 7 1764, daughter of the classical philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne; died in Augsburg on the night of June 14/15 1829. She was one of the so-called Universitätsmamsellen, five daughters of academics at Göttingen University who would probably have got professoress-ships themselves in today’s world, but... the others were Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, Caroline Schelling, Philippine Engelhard and Dorothea Schlözer: more on them here.

She became the first woman editor of a major literary journal - though she did so anonymously for many years, because women in Deutschland at that time were supposed to manage family homes, not newspapers - and wrote many novels in which the women sort of did but really didn't quite conform to the stereotype just described. Her obituary was written by no less a person than Wilhelm von Humboldt, so clearly her intellectual credentials were in tact.

But enough of bio (though if you insist on more, try here); what should matter to posterity is that she was one of the most prolific writers of late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany, publishing more than sixty stories, six novels, almost four thousand letters, and translating several works from French and English into German - all that in addition to her journalism. From 1816 to 1823 she edited the "popular" German newspaper, “Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände” (“Morning Daily for the Cultured Classes”), a paper whose title suggests that it probably wasn’t an equivalent of The Sun, The Mirror or The Mail, so “popular”, not “populist”.

Growing up in such an intellectual home, and with four such educated friends, was obviously an advantage, but getting the husband right can help too. Her first, named Georg, was the son of the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, and had travelled as his dad’s personal assistant on James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–75) - that’s him on the left, with dad in New Zealand, the portrait viewable at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery, or online with more info about the importance of the work they did, here. Georg’s part-science part-travelogue account of the voyage of The Resolution sold more copies than any of Theresa’s. Apparently Theresa didn’t mind.

And now I do need to return to biography, because, in 1801, she published a best-seller of her own, the first novel in world literature set in an Australian penal settlement. I wonder where she got her information? Entitled “Adventures on a Journey to New Holland”, it tells the story of people who got caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which is also a funny coincidence, because both she and Georg were such ardent supporters of the French Revolution, they had been forced to leave their home in Mainz for Neufchâtel in Switzerland in 1792, when it became clear that they would come under personal threat from Prussian troops advancing to free Mainz from the French army.

“Adventures on a Journey to New Holland” is unsurprisingly vague about Australia, relying as it did on Georg’s brief visit, and not having him him around any longer to add more from memory - he died in 1794. Nevertheless she produced a sequel, “The Lonely Deathbed”, in 1810.

But I have jumped ahead: she and Georg had left for Switzerland in 1792, and Georg, as noted, died two years later. With them had fled a close friend, a Saxon diplomat named Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. The couple married, but he had no source of income save a few savings, and so she needed to earn for the two of them from her writing. The novel “Die Familie Seldorf”, with the French Revolution as its central theme, occupied 1795 and 1796; but Huber died in 1804, and “The Lonely Deathbed” was rather more a matter of financial necessity than the extension of literary investigation. She is remembered today as Germany's first professional woman writer.