I interpret the subtitle of the 1913 edition of Caroline’s letters quite broadly. These “letters from early Romanticism” now include voluminous additional correspondence and documents not only from the early Romantic school itself, but also from virtually everyone whose correspondence or memoirs touched on Caroline’s life, including persons more directly involved in the lives and careers of her acquaintances.
Such applies especially to her second and third husbands, Wilhelm Schlegel and F. W. J. Schelling, whose personal lives, professional careers, publications, disputes, appointments, and disappointments directly affected parts of her life as diverse as where she lived to what she discussed in letters, and similarly often largely determined her circles of friends and adversaries. The quotidian concerns, problems, and disputes (both internal and external) of the early Romantic group in Jena are exhaustively represented in correspondence and various other published pieces because such concretely and dramatically affected Caroline’s life.
The project’s guiding principle has been to include as much material as possible that throws light on Caroline’s personality, life, and letters, and on the personalities and lives of her acquaintances to the extent such illuminates Caroline or her letters, especially since such material is in almost all cases in German and is often difficult or cumbersome to access.
The considerably expanded scope and nature of the notes and scholarly apparatus for this edition derive from the nature of Erich Schmidt’s original apparatus in the edition of 1913 and his target audience. Although Schmidt’s annotations are invaluable and are essentially included in full (I have also been able to correct some of Schmidt’s errors), they have severe limitations for English-speaking readers:
- The apparatus was prepared for specialists, historians, and lay readers whose educational background, as a shared cultural heritage, familiarized them beforehand both with the period itself and with many of the attendant figures and works.
- Schmidt similarly presupposed that these readers had ready access to what today, often even in Germany, are largely specialized library resources (in German, of course). The present notes and apparatus address both issues for the benefit of the English-speaking, nonspecialist reader.
Because referring readers of a translation to materials in the original language can be frustrating for the reader, and in many instances such materials are difficult to access in any case (including numerous letters and materials Erich Schmidt cross-references in other collections), this project’s main strategy for making the edition more useful and straightforward has been simply to resolve Schmidt’s cross-references and allusions.
In most cases, “resolve” means including a translation of the cross-referenced material, be it a letter, an extensive passage from a memoir or a brief one from a diary, a passage from a work published at the time, lines from a play, a newspaper announcement, a literary review, a satire, a letter to the editor, in short, virtually every genre of writing common during the period.
The sometimes swift and bewildering course of military and geopolitical history that affected Caroline’s life is similarly covered in notes and supplementary appendices and also includes lesser known episodes and developments.
Concerning the general disposition of these supplementary appendices, see the appendices introduction. Concerning the kinds of materials included in those appendices, see the Supplementary Appendices Volume 1 and the Supplementary Appendices Volume 2, the list of audio music selections, and certainly also the numerous galleries.
This edition also includes translations of the anonymous literary reviews that can reliably (or likely) be attributed to Caroline. See the introductory pages for her literary reviews for volume 1 and for volume 2. — Another addition is the translation of extensive passages from works discussing in considerable detail Caroline’s contribution to Wilhelm Schlegel’s pioneering translation of Shakespeare.
One convenient feature this edition offers beyond the editions of 1913 and later is the seamless chronological presentation of materials otherwise only cross-referenced in notes or presented in appendices (e.g., Friedrich Schlegel’s letters to Auguste Böhmer), especially letters written by others.
