Letters Intro

Letters Introduction — Editorial Considerations

As far as the letters proper are concerned, Caroline: Letters from Early Romanticism is divided into seven sections accessible here and from the index for each volume in the drop-down menus from this page:

Throughout the edition, letters are presented in the chronological order based essentially on their ordering in Erich Schmidt edition of 1913, each letter being assigned the same number it bears in that edition. That is, readers can generally rely on letter numbering remaining the same in this and the original edition. The few exceptions to Schmidt’s numbering are noted in editorial headnotes.

Letters added to Schmidt’s edition are kept in chronological order and given letter numbers ending in a letter, e.g., 121a, 121b, and so on. In a few instances, Schmidt’s own use of a, b, c, etc. made it necessary to begin the extra numbering with .1, .2, .3, most notably for letters with numbers 134, 135, and 136 (e.g., 135.1, 135.2), in which cases I have in some instances simplified Schmidt’s own numbering by including the entire original letter from which excerpts of Caroline’s letters was taken. For example, letters 135a and 135b in Schmidt’s edition were excerpts originally cited in a single letter Friedrich Schlegel wrote to his brother Wilhelm Schlegel; I include that entire original letter—with the excerpts—as 135ab.

This edition, rather than being a historical-critical edition, is instead a translation of Erich Schmidt’s edition of 1913 and of complementary letters of Caroline’s contemporaries bearing either directly or indirectly on her own circumstances or letters (sources for the latter are always given in editorial headnotes). The only manuscripts consulted thus far are those transferred during the Second World War for safe-keeping from Berlin to the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow, a collection comprising twenty-four letters written between 1786 and 1794. Surprisingly, several of these manuscripts were quite useful in resolving questions Erich Schmidt himself had or in correcting some of his own readings (such are noted in annotations). Several manuscripts of new letters located since Erich Schmidt’s edition of 1913 will be added later.

Letters include an editorial headnote when necessary to provide either the source(s) of the letter or other information relating to its provenance, dating, content, or other issues. In some instances, this edition redates letters that have been misdated by previous editors; reasons for doing so are always provided in the editorial headnote.

Detailed information about Caroline’s correspondents and other important figures in her letters, can be found in the section Dramatis personae, to which names within letters are generally linked on first occurrence and thereafter only if confusion may arise within a cluster of names, if the person is not particularly well known and yet recurs later in a letter, or if the letter itself is particularly long. Annotations to the text clarify references to persons, books, plays, poems, places, quotations, foreign language entries, and events within the main body of each individual letter, and link the reader to the various supplementary appendices.

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