Huch, Ricarda (1864–1947)

German writer. A leader of the neo-Romantics, her finest novels include Aus der Triumphgasse 1902, dealing with Italian working-class life, and Der grosse Krieg in Deutschland 1912–14, on the Thirty Years' War. As a critic, she wrote brilliantly on German Romanticism in Die Blütezeit der Romantik 1899 and Die Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik 1902. She also wrote on political subjects (Michael Bakunin und die Anarchie 1923) and religion (Luthers Glaube 1915, Das Zeitalter der Glaubenspaltung 1937).

She was born in Brunswick and educated at Zürich, where in 1897 she took one of the first doctorates awarded to a woman and became secretary of the State Library there. In 1907 she married a cousin (her second husband), Richard Huch, a lawyer, and travelled in Italy before settling in Munich. Her early work Erinnerungen von Ludolf Ursleu dem Jüngeren 1893 was a ‘critical novel’ which contained not only elements of Romanticism but also of the pessimistic naturalism which she subsequently rejected; she emerged as a neo-Romantic in her later novels. A bitter opponent of the Nazis, she resigned from the Academy of Arts and Sciences after Hitler came to power 1933.