DROSTE-HLSHOFF, ANNETTE, BARONESS (FREIIN) VON

born Jan. 10, 1797, Schloss Hlshoff, near Mnster, Westphalia died May 25, 1848, Meersburg, Baden original name Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolphine Wilhelmine Louise Maria, Freiin Von Droste Zu Hlshoff one of the great women poets of Germany, author of prose tales that are considered the forerunner of the 19th-century realistic short story. Born into a family of Roman Catholic aristocracy, she was educated by tutors and lived most of her life in isolation. She owed her introduction to literature to a young novelist, Levin Schcking (181483), for whom, despite their difference in age, she developed a deep, suppressed, and unreciprocated passion. Her first collection of poetry, Gedichte (1838; Poems), included poems of a deeply religious nature. Between 1829 and 1839 she wrote a cycle of religious poems, Das geistliche Jahr (1851; The Spiritual Year), which contains some of the most earnest religious poetry of the 19th century and reflects the inner turbulence and doubt of her spiritual life. Her fame rests chiefly on her poetry dealing with her native Westphalian landscape. An extremely sensitive and acute observer, she created detailed and evocative descriptions of extraordinary poetic beauty, capturing the atmosphere of her homeland, particularly its gloomy heaths and moorlands. Her only complete prose work, a novella, Die Judenbuche (1842; The Jew's Beech), is a psychological study of a Westphalian villager who murders a Jew. For the first time in German literature, the fate of the hero is portrayed as arising from his social environment; the crime becomes understandable within the context of the life in the village.