ABSTRACT
The privileging of women writers seen as progressive has dovetailed with a more general aversion in German literary studies to ideologies and people labelled 'conservative' or 'reactionary'. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was long positioned in the scholarly and popular press as a conservative writer of Austrian realism who embodied goodness and compassion in her texts and life. Karlheinz Rossbacher looks to Ebner as a representative of Vienna's liberal Ringstrasse era and thus underscores the anachronistic use of the label 'conservative' when applied to Ebner by modern critics. Given this background, it is significant that Ebner, whose own apartment was located in the old inner city, sets Lotti there as well, rather than in the 'new' Vienna. The city was the focus of such well-known nineteenth-century critics of modern life as Ferdinand Tonnies and Camillo Sitte. Lotti's inner-city courtyard community prefigures the reforms of modern society proposed at a later date by Tonnies and Sitte.
