Baroness Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti would be a forgotten author of pious historical works had not her novel Jesse und Mari: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulandea (1906; translated as Jesse and Maria, 1931) become the focal point in the bitter fight between Integralists and Anti-Modernists, the two camps that dominated political and cultural life in the Catholic regions of the German-speaking countries in the early twentieth century. Handel-Mazzetti tried to steer a middle course between the two movements. Her neoromantic historical novels, dealing with confessional war and reconciliation, marked an important stage in the reintegration of Catholic writers into mainstream German literature, from which the Kulturkampf (conflict between the state and the Catholic church) of 1872 to 1878 had excluded them. Handel-Mazzetti was a popular and respected writer who helped open lines of communication by advocating tolerance.

Handel-Mazzetti was the second child of Irene Cshergeö von Handel-Mazzetti, the widow of Heinrich von...