Caroline Auguste Fischer (maiden name Venturini, married name Christiani, born 9 August 1764 in Braunschweig – died 26 May 1842 in Frankfurt) was a German writer and women's rights activist.
Life
On her father's side, Caroline Auguste Venturini's family was probably of Italian origin. Her father Karl Venturini (1735–1801) was a chamber musician at the ducal court in Braunschweig and her mother Charlotty, whose maiden name was Köchy, was the daughter of a tailor. Her brother Karl Heinrich Georg Venturini was a famous early-19th-century theologist and writer. Her other three siblings died young.
In her first marriage, she was married to the Pastor Cristoph Johann Rudolph Christiani (1761–1841), at the latest from the year 1791. From 1793, Christiani was the German high priest in Copenhagen and ran a boys' school there, at which her brother Karl taught for several years. The jurist and politician Rudolf Christiani (1797–1858) was their son. A daughter of theirs, who was born as early as 1792, died at the age of three in 1795. During her time in Copenhagen, she rubbed shoulders with Danish and German artists. Among others, she was friendly with the writer Jens Immanuel Baggesen. In the year 1801, she was deemed the guilty party in her divorce from Christiani and therefore had to leave her son in her father's custody. Caroline Auguste Christiani, who was also called Caroline Auguste Ferdinande Christiani, thereupon went to Dresden. In the same year, she began to write and thereby soon became famous. At this time, she was already living together with the businessman and writer Christian August Fischer, who had been a professor in Würzburg since 1804 and with whom she had a son, Albert, in 1803. They lived separately, but ended up marrying in 1808 after all, probably so that their son would be considered legitimate. They divorced again after just 7 months of marriage in 1809. He himself admitted to having been put off by her advanced age and overwhelmed by her fame.
Even though Christian Fischer had to pay alimony as the guilty party in the divorce, Caroline Auguste Fischer got into financial difficulty. Having published her first novels as early as 1801, she worked as a writer and, in 1816; her divorced husband was dismissed from the university and subsequently discontinued the alimony payments, meaning that she would have less and less time to dedicate to her writing. Up until 1820, she was still writing stories and newspaper articles, after which year she made a living as the principal of a reform school in Heidelberg and as a library book dealer in Frankfurt. In her later years, she suffered from melancholy, which is why she was admitted to a care home for several weeks in 1832. She subsequently moved to Frankfurt to live with her son. After Albert's death two years later, nothing more is known about her. Completely impoverished, she died in the Frankfurt Hospice of the Holy Spirit in 1842.
Work
After her divorce, Caroline Auguste Christiani began to write. In her work, which was probably also influenced by her own life, she depicted the tension between the genders, juxtaposing traditional female role models with new, alternative ways for women to live their lives, which mostly completely contradicted the idealistic view of the woman in the early 19th century. In line with her call for equality, which only existed for men in the French Revolution, she called for women's right to an independent way of life, which could also absolutely still be traditional marriage. Her debut novel Gustav's Aberrations was published anonymously. She narrated the story from the perspective of the male protagonist, detailing his feelings towards different women in his life. He repeatedly idealises them and is then repulsed when he discovers a real, independent person instead of his ideal. Gustav ashamedly recognises the societal gap between the genders. Chastened and suffering from a sexually transmitted disease he returns to his first true love. However, he then wants to get divorced because the ideal of their marriage cannot be fulfilled: they do not have any children and, as a consequence, he believes he will make his wife unhappy. Like the previous wives, the wife and her wishes are not part of his imagination. The book ends with Gustav's premature death and his widow's second marriage, which produces many children.