‘Die Neue Frau’ in the Correspondence of Johanna Kinkel, Malwida von Meysenbug and Fanny Lewald

Johanna Kinkel (1810–58), Malwida von Meysenbug (1816–1903) and Fanny Lewald (1811–89) were three key female thinkers in Germany at the time of the Revolution of 1848/49. This article establishes the significance of their little known, in part unpublished, early correspondence and demonstrates the difficulty of any generalising account of ‘women's history’ and ‘women's writing’. The exchanges between the three correspondents are shaped by a series of conflicting attitudes and pressures. On the one hand the correspondents wanted to help create a politically enlightened Germany and thus tended to project images of their addressees or themselves as ‘new women’. On the other hand they were concerned to present, even to one another, a self‐image that conformed to current, rather conservative, social norms and prescriptions. All three women found it difficult to sustain either image under pressure from the conflicts in their daily lives. Some of the reasons for the ultimate disappointment of their hopes for rapid change can be traced in this correspondence.