Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848)

The poet Anna Elizabeth (Annette) Freiin von Droste-Hülshoff was born at Castle Hülshoff near Münster on January 10, 1797, and died at Meersburg on May 24, 1848. She came from an old Westphalian family of strict Catholic lineage. When she was 21 she travelled with her father to Kassel to meet the Grimms, and two subsequent long stays in the Rhineland enlarged her excellent education and brought her into considerable contact with the literari of her age. From 1826 she lived in Röschhaus near Nieuberge, had a serious but broken off friendship with Levin Schücking, and after 1840 was frequently at Castle Meersburg on the Bodensee.

Besides her love of nature, a devout piety stamps all her work. In her nature lyrics realism is mixed with gloomy mysteries and heroics, even death. Her first major entry into the poetic world was with the poem cycle "The Spiritual Year" (1820), in which motifs of evil, anxiety and guilt, alientation from God but also God's grace are characteristic throughout. She wrote a crime novel, "The Beech Tree of the Jews" (1842), which in portrayal and analysis of human guilt is among the best of German realist narratives of the 19th century.

Her later works, such as The Hospice of the Great St. Bernard (1828-34), The Doctor's Legacy (1834), The Battle in Loener Bruch (1837-38), and the ballad, The familiar spirit of the Roßtäuschers(1842), were included in the 1844 collection Poetry, from which also come the two poems set by Franz Biebl in our catalog. Many of these works feature the overlapping of dreams and reality, as illustrated perhaps by Lord, grant that I may see.

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