THE NOTION THAT DRAMA is a masculine genre dogs the critical reception of women playwrights. The young Alexander von Weilen, son of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's literary acquaintance, Joseph von Weilen, demonstrates the ubiquity of the idea at the turn of the nineteenth century. Commenting in 1890, when Ebner was sixty years old and well established as a prose writer, Alexander glibly assesses her achievements: “Den wenigen Dramen, welche die Ebner verfaßt, fehlt nichts als — die Hand des Mannes, welche allein die Gewalt fordernde Form zu beherrschen vermag.” Even though he writes with the flourish of one presenting a revelation, von Weilen is making no pathbreaking contribution to turnof- the-century criticism. He is merely parroting the established notion that the role of the dramatist is the role of the dominant male. Nonetheless, an idea repeated often enough can become reality, and Weilen's predictable assertion that Ebner, as a woman, simply could not also be a dramatist, finds its unfortunate echo in the fact that, by 1890, she was no longer writing dramas. At most she still wrote comic one-act plays, but she had abandoned her more serious aspirations in the genre, and was received for almost a hundred years much as Otto Krack described her in 1898: “Die Bühnendichterin kann sich mit der Erzählerin nicht messen.”

Ebner certainly once had dramatic aspirations. At the age of fourteen, Marie Dubsky, later von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), told her family she intended to be the German Shakespeare of the nineteenth century. The significance of her ambition should not be underestimated. Ebner wanted to write historical tragedy, a particularly high-status literary form, associated in Germany with Schiller and Goethe; at age fourteen she felt able to align herself with the most influential dramatist in Western literary history, Shakespeare. Her dearest wish, then and later, was to see her work performed at Vienna's Burgtheater. With a fine disregard for nineteenth-century cultural beliefs regarding the role and capacity of women, the young Ebner intended her work to be neither trivial nor supportive.