Only a Girl: Or, a Physician for the Soul.

A delicate girl. A father who calls her a mistake. One of the most piercing portraits of childhood emotional neglect in 19th-century German literature. Ernestine Hartwich is not wanted. Born on a desolate Northern German estate to a bitter invalid who needed a son, she arrives into a world that has already decided she is worthless. Her father views her as evidence of his failure. She is forbidden from the schoolroom, denied warmth, made to feel that her very existence is an imposition. Yet Ernestine endures, finding small moments of grace in a kind word from a stranger, in the solitary beauty of the moors, in the stubbornness of her own surviving spirit. Von Hillern wrote this novel in 1870, when daughters in Germany could be legally disinherited for sons. This is not a comfortable read. It is a book that asks what happens to a child who is told she does not matter, and what it might take to believe otherwise. For readers who appreciate literary fiction that confronts the invisible wounds of conditional love.