The Seldorf family

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The Seldorf family is a debut novel by Therese Huber from 1795 , which she published under the name of her second husband Ludwig Ferdinand Huber .

content

The novel is about a noble family who experienced the French Revolution first hand . At the beginning of the novel in 1784, the family moved to the French province of Poitou , where they had a country estate. The reason for the move is the death of Father Seldorf's wife, who served as an excellent German naval officer during the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution . His children Theodor and Sara (main character), who have a secret love affair, grow up together with the grandson of the neighboring lawyer Berthier, who is strongly attracted to Sara and in love with her. However, when the French Revolution began and various conflicts and disputes gradually broke out in Paris, the harmonious, rural life collapsed. Theodor, the son of the Seldorfs, secretly travels to the capital to fight. He fought on the side of the royalists and even married a noblewoman.

It seems as if Sara and Roger are left alone now, but the patriotic Roger also goes to war and so Sara is left alone. Sara falls in love with Count L., from whom she is expecting a child. When her father Seldorf died, she lived with neighbor Berthier for a while and was later brought to Paris by her lover. During an attack in 1792, Sara and her daughter get caught between the fighting. The royalist L. accidentally shoots her child. When Sara learns of his marriage to a pregnant woman that L. is supposed to lead, she joins the revolutionaries in order to kill her beloved count. The attempt to kill the captured count fails. Sara is involved in the revolutionary struggles and demands the king's execution. When she became seriously ill, she had to take a longer break, after which she began to fight the counter-revolutionaries as a soldier. During a fight she finds her brother Theodor, who entrusts her to Hyppolit, L.'s son. A short time later Sara has to leave the army because of her female gender. She decides to stay in the ruins and take care of Hyppolit's upbringing. Roger finds her there, but Sara rejects his proposal.

Narrative form

The novel is told in the Er-form. The narrative form gives you an inside view, which creates a certain closeness. The narrator behaves like an author , withdrawing in parts also personally behind a figure perspective. The narrative report dominates as a type of presentation, but the character speech is also used.

expenditure

  • The Seldorf family. A story. 2 volumes. Cotta, Tübingen 1795/96.
  • Reprint in: Magdalene Heuser (Ed.); Therese Huber: Novels and Stories. Volume 1, Olms, Hildesheim 1989, ISBN 3-487-09146-1 .
  • The Seldorf family. Paperback. Edition Holzinger, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4825-8039-6 .

literature

  • Johannes Birgfeld: Therese Huber The Seldorf Family (1795/1796) . In: Hermann Gätje, Sikander Singh (eds.): Transitions, breaks, approaches - contributions to the history of literature in Saarland, Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg and Belgium. Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken 2015, ISBN 978-3-86223-193-5 , pp. 33–50, online .
  • Susanne Balmer: The female development novel. Individual life plans in the bourgeois age . Böhlau, Cologne 2011, pp. 215–265.
  • Mechthilde Vahsen: The politicization of the female subject: German novelists and the French Revolution (1790-1820) . Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2000, pp. 117-133.
  • Gudrun Loster-Schneider, Gaby Pailer: Lexicon of German-language epics and drama by women authors (1730–1900) . Francke, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-7720-8189-4 , p. 222.
  • Barbara Becker-Cantarion: Writers of the Romantic period: Epoch-Works-Effect. Beck, Munich 2000, pp. 68-110.