Love's Joy and Sorrow
Between Women

When Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women (Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau) was published in Berlin in 1895, it was immediately banned under obscenity laws. Its author, Emilie Knopf, was tried twice and fined for distributing it. Then the book vanished — until a single surviving copy was found in a Berlin archive, and the world finally got to read what all the fuss was about.

Meet Felicita: artist, romantic, and unapologetic lover of women. Her great love is Edita, a musician from a Rhine castle, and their relationship is the beating heart of this witty, warm, and surprisingly modern novel. But Felicita's eye has a tendency to wander — toward a scheming French comtesse, an alluring blonde in a green velvet dress, and the glittering, dangerous world of late 19th-century European society.

Part love story, part social comedy, part moral drama — and entirely unlike anything else written in its time — Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women is a novel that deserved a century of readers it never got. Now, in this first complete English translation, it finally has a chance.

Perfect for readers of The Price of Salt, Fingersmith, The Well of Loneliness, and Tipping the Velvet, and for fans of Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Donoghue.

Emilie Knopf is one of the most obscure figures in 19th-century German literature — not through lack of talent, but through the deliberate suppression of her work. When she published Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau (Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women) in Berlin in 1895, the novel was swiftly banned under obscenity laws, and Knopf was prosecuted twice for its distribution. The resulting fines and legal pressure effectively silenced her, and her name disappeared from the literary record.

Almost nothing is known of her biography. She left behind no letters, no memoirs, no subsequent publications. For well over a century, she was forgotten — along with the novel she had risked so much to put into the world.

The discovery of a single surviving copy in a Berlin archive has given Knopf's work a second life. Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women now stands as a remarkable artifact of late 19th-century LGBTQ+ literary history: frank, funny, emotionally sophisticated, and generations ahead of its time. This Ovid Publishing Group edition — the first complete English translation — finally gives Emilie Knopf the readers she never had.

Arthur C. Rauscher is the translator and editor of this edition. His work brings Knopf's original German text into English for the first time in full, accompanied by chapter-by-chapter summaries, historical notes, and a comprehensive introduction placing the novel in its literary and cultural context.