The Mask and the Quill is an important contribution to German studies, gender studies, and performance studies, with quotations given both in the original German and in English translations. [The lengthy quotations] complements the ‘feminist recovery project’ Dupree explicitly invokes in her introduction. Dupree’s book offers a sustained argument on the intersection of women writers and women actresses, and points to the complexities these women faced in establishing identities both for society and for themselves. The trajectory she outlines is compelling, and one might see if this model applies to other actress writers of the time, as well as to other women whose identities encompassed more than one public persona.

Modern Language Review

What makes Mary Helen Dupree’s book so valuable is the perfect synthesisof both approaches. Her main objective is to focus on female authors who were at the same time actresses and who represent a new generation of young women 'who came of age at a time when the status of the actress was beginning to be radically redefined in accordance with Enlightenment aesthetics and the cult of sensibility, as the model of the enterprising actress-director in the tradition of Neuber gave way to an idealizing view of the actress as a sentimental heroine'. . . .Dupree unfolds a fascinating, comprehensive, and coherent argument focusing on a wide range of literary genres of self-expression in order to get a larger picture of the literary imagination of the actress-writer circa 1800, starting with the culturally 'imagined' new type of 'Gefühlsschauspielerin' and continuing with the different modes and forms of 'self-imagining'by Albrecht, Ehrmann, and Bürger.

Journal Of Germanic Studies