In the end, everything written is indiscreet.

In a carefully orchestrated and nuanced consideration of four 19th-century German Romantic writers and three 20th century novelists, Ursula R. Mahlendorf, a professor of German at the University of California at Santa Barbara, offers the reader a rich psychobiographical feast replete with new insights into the intimate relationships of writers and their novella characters. The book is a textual and psychoanalytic study of the writers and their novellas, and is of particular interest to the present writer because of its chapters on the creative process.

Mahlendorf has chosen to study examples of Kuenstlernovellen and Kuenstlerromanen because as novellas, their central concern is the creation