Trotzkopf's Brautzeit

This 1917 novel continues the story of Ilse, the fiercely independent heroine first introduced in "Der Trotzkopf," now grappling with the suffocating expectations of engagement. Her fiancé Leo Gontrau is a decent man who nevertheless assumes his bride will gracefully surrender her personality to wifely propriety. Ilse has no intention of doing any such thing. What begins as a sunny afternoon argument about marital expectations escalates into a full rupture: Ilse flees to her friend Nellie's apartment, leaving her family and Leo frantic with worry about her whereabouts. There she finds her former schoolmates Flora and Rosi, now married and somehow managing to inhabit their new lives with varying degrees of contentment. The novel pulses with the tension between duty and selfhood, between love and the preservation of one's essential self. It's a remarkably forward-thinking portrait of a woman who refuses to be domesticated, written during an era when such rebellion was genuinely radical.