The Mask and the Quill

In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a small but significant number of German actresses, including Sophie Albrecht (1757-1840), Marianne Ehrmann (1755-1795) and Elise BYrger (1769-1833), began to publish poetry, autobiography, drama and short fiction under their own names. These 'actress-writers' came of age at a time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult of sensibility, as the model of the