Between Self‐Empowerment and Appropriation: Negotiating Women's Writing in Prague During the Mid‐Nineteenth Century

The narrative of women's emancipation is dominated by the Western European perspective. But what was the situation in the Czech lands, a culturally heterogeneous region where German, Czech and Jewish literature existed side by side? This study explores the complex processes that shaped the emergence and reception of women's literature in the Czech lands in the 1830s and 1840s. The recognition of women writers here emerges from multifaceted negotiations involving male critics, editors and gatekeepers of literature, rather than women themselves. Critics set the boundaries of acceptable women's writing: they preferred certain genres and rejected politically charged feminist voices.