Marie Eugenie delle Grazie's career spanned approximately fifty years, during which she produced work in many literary genres. During the first decade of the twentieth century she was regarded as one of the foremost women writers in the German language and was hailed as the greatest female epic poet; she was not yet forty when the well-known Leipzig firm of Breitkopf und Härtel published a nine-volume collection of her works in 1903-1904. But she proved unable to sustain this early promise, and by the time of her death her reputation had waned considerably. Those who had predicted a great future for her on the basis of the modern spirit in her early writings found little interest in her later mystical-religious works. Today she is usually characterized as a freethinker who turned pious with advancing age and fled to the protection of the Catholic church. Nevertheless, in...