Book completed

[eve_prime]

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, by Andrea Wulf. This is a book that will teach you to tell apart Schiller, Schelling, and the two Schlegels. It's a collective biography of a group mostly living in the small university community of Jena, Germany: Goethe, Fichte, Novalis, and the aforementioned group, including their wives and partners, and with Caroline Schlegel Schelling as the focal point. I rather liked Goethe and Schelling, but the rest were by and large exceedingly self-involved and pleased with themselves, in just the way that people who see themselves as creating a whole new artistic outlook (in philosophy, poetry, playwriting, and essays) are likely to be. I found Caroline especially tiresome, although two of the three most sympathetic men were married to her and loved her greatly (the nicer of the Schlegels, then Schelling). I also wish the author had paid more attention to the downsides of Romanticism. Her previous book on Alexander von Humboldt was great, and whenever he showed up in Jena it was refreshing.