Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Around 1800, literary and gender discourses intersected in novel conceptualisations of friendship. Departing from a discussion of the possibility of female friendship, this paper offers a reading of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary friendship with Julie Bondeli as it is presented in her late work <jats:italic>Mein Schreibetisch</jats:italic> (1799). This literary friendship, I argue, is offered as a model of female friendship that invites emulation. It thereby becomes an implicit – and only retrospectively reconstructable – beginning of a tradition of female literary friendship and authorship.</jats:p>