hfulness disports itself in its irresponsibility.
"O you poor young folks of today," exclaims the young Weimar authoress,
"if you had any idea what riches, what abundance of life the young
folks had at their command at the beginning of our century, you would
bitterly complain, you would seem to yourselves deceived and defrauded,
old from the cradle, forced into the straight-jackets of duty!"

A certain disgust with the colorless life of the philistine borough
into which Weimar more and more degenerated after Goethe's death may be
read between the lines of this apostrophe. Repelled by the gloomy
humdrum and filled with dreams of past greatness as well as with
longing for a more abundant life in the future, the young writer felt
the close confinement of her home town. In this state of mind she met
the man who proved to be her fate. Since his first, unhappy marriage
had been annulled according to Turkish, but not according to German
law, she followed him to Constantinople, and Helene Boehlau became
Madame Al Raschid Bey. The Orient furnished the German authoress with
strikingly few motifs; but Munich, whither she later returned with her
husband, became her second home. On the bank of the Isar lies the scene
of her best novel, _The Switching Station_ (1895). In this book she is
a disciple of naturalism, not merely in respect to the fidelity with
which life in the art centre and the restless haste and nervous
disorderliness in an artist's family are depicted, but also in the use
of symbolism after the manner of Zola: for the switching station, with
its purposeless turmoil, its disquietude, its pulling and hauling, is a
symbol for the noisy life in general, and in particular for the
comfortless, hapless marriage in which a delicately organized artistic
soul is worried to death. The fate of the woman who becomes the victim
of a man is the theme of the succeeding novels, _A Mother's Rights_
(1897) and _Half Beast_ (1899), in which Helene Boehlau enters the lists
side by side with Gabriele Reuter and Marie Janitschek and other women
as a passionate champion of the rights of her ever oppressed sex. From
the point of view of literary art the immoderate formlessness of these
partisan novels was an aberration; but meanwhile the writer has once
more emancipated herself from such servitude to the cause. The finest
understanding for feminine characters, all of which are children of her
heart, cannot indeed compensate for imperfect compr