Athena
Untamed

Berlin, 2020. A librarian sorting through archive boxes discovers a cloth-bound manuscript — the only surviving copy of a book published in 1895 and lost to history. Its title: Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau. Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women. What follows is the story of the woman who wrote it.

Berlin, 1878. Emilie Knopf is eighteen, gifted, and expected to disappear quietly into a suitable marriage. When she attends a Kostümball dressed as Athena, she is determined to do her duty to her family. Instead, she meets Marie von Czarwinski — violinist, composer, widow, and the most dangerous woman in the room.

What begins as an unexpected encounter becomes a love story that will carry them from the salons and drawing rooms of Berlin across Europe and North Africa, and back again to a city transforming beyond recognition — through the wreckage of one World War, the freedom of the Weimar years and Berlin's notorious gay underground, and into the gathering shadow of the Third Reich.

Athena Untamed is a novel about two women who chose each other across fifty years of history that did everything it could to keep them apart. It is about art, music, desire, and the particular courage of living honestly and remaining true to oneself.

The spark for Athena Untamed came from real history. While researching public domain texts for Ovid Publishing Group, Arthur C. Rauscher came across a reference to a book called Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau — Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women — believed to exist in a single surviving copy at the Berlin State Library. The cover bore no date, no author's name, and an imprint that had been blacked out and replaced with an obscure distributor from Pomerania.

The book was published in 1895 and banned twice by the Berlin Regional Court under Paragraph 184 of the German Penal Code. By 1898, the author had been identified: a woman named Emilie Knopf, tried and fined twice for distributing it — along with a friend of hers, Marie von Czarwinski.

Almost nothing else is known about them. Athena Untamed is the novel that asks: who were these women, and what happened to them? It is fiction, built on extremely sparse evidence, imagining the full arc of their lives across fifty years of German history.

Rauscher's translation and edition of Knopf's original novel — Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women — is also available from Ovid Publishing Group.

Ovid Publishing Group's LGBTQ+ Library brings forgotten and overlooked works of queer literature back into print through new English translations and carefully annotated editions. Specializing in public domain works from the 18th through early 20th centuries, the collection recovers voices that were censored, prosecuted, published anonymously, or simply lost to time — from the gay underground of Weimar Berlin to the only surviving copy of an 1895 lesbian novel pulled from the shelves of the Berlin State Library.

Each edition pairs faithful new translations with scholarly introductions that place these works in their historical and cultural context, ensuring that the pioneers of LGBTQ+ literature finally reach the modern readers they were written for.

Arthur C. Rauscher is the founder and publisher of Ovid Publishing Group, and the translator and editor of its Schnitzler Collection — including new annotated English editions of Dream Story, The Round Dance, Fräulein Else, Lieutenant Gustl, The Road Into The Open, and The Plays Vol. 1 — as well as the first complete English translation of Emilie Knopf's Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women.

Athena Untamed: A Story of Women's Love is his first novel. It grew directly from his research into Knopf's lost book, and from the questions he found himself unable to stop asking: who were these women, and what was their story? He is serializing it weekly on Substack.