Caroline Michaelis (widowed Böhmer, later Schlegel, then Schelling, 1763-1809) was born in the university town of Göttingen, where her father was a professor of theology and oriental studies. After Caroline’s first husband and two of her children died, she moved to Mainz as a young widow in 1792. In October 1792, Mainz was occupied by revolutionary French troops, and on March 18, 1793, the Mainz Republic was proclaimed. Caroline openly supported the revolutionary, democratic movement. When she feared that Mainz would be recaptured by the Prussian army, she left the city with her eight-year-old daughter Auguste and several other republican sympathizers. On the same day, they were arrested near Mainz and imprisoned at Königstein Castle. Caroline Böhmer wrote this letter dated April 19, 1793 to her friend Louise Gotter and her husband, the writer Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, while she was imprisoned in Königstein. At the time, Caroline was pregnant with the child of a French officer and feared that her pregnancy would be discovered. After her brother had written to the Prussian king, Caroline and her daughter were released from prison in July. As she was unmarried at the time, she gave birth to her child in secret and left it with a foster family in Saxony, where it died two years later. Her imprisonment had damaged her reputation so much that she was declared “undesirable” in her home town of Göttingen. In 1796, Caroline married August Wilhelm Schlegel, who had been a friend and supporter of hers. They then moved to Jena, where Schlegel was a professor at the university, and both became part of the Jena intellectual circle that shaped early German Romanticism. During this time, the couple worked on several German translations of Shakespeare’s plays. Caroline also wrote literary reviews, but it is primarily her letters that have survived and provide insights into the German intellectual life of the time and its protagonists. The Schlegels’ marriage was unhappy though and the couple divorced in 1803. One month later, Caroline married the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, with whom she had already had an intimate relationship during their marriage.