Love's Joy and Sorrow
Between Women

A Rediscovered Classic of LGBTQ+ Literature. A banned novel. A lost author. A love story that refused to stay buried.

When Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women was published in Berlin in 1895, it was immediately banned under Germany's strict obscenity laws. Its author, Emilie Knopf, was tried twice and fined for distributing it. Then the book vanished — until a single surviving copy was found in a Berlin archive.

Meet Felicita: artist, romantic, and unapologetic lover of women. Her great love is Edita, a musician from a Rhine castle, and their relationship is the beating heart of this witty, warm, and surprisingly modern novel. But Felicita's eye has a tendency to wander — toward a scheming French comtesse, an alluring blonde in a green velvet dress, and the quickly evolving culture of late 19th-century European society.

Part romantic love story, part social comedy, part moral drama — and entirely unlike anything else written in its time — Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women is a novel that deserved a century of readers it never got.

Ovid Publishing Group's LGBTQ+ Library brings forgotten and overlooked works of queer literature back into print through new English translations and carefully annotated editions. Specializing in public domain works from the 18th through early 20th centuries, the collection recovers voices that were censored, prosecuted, published anonymously, or simply lost to time — from the gay underground of Weimar Berlin to the only surviving copy of an 1895 lesbian novel pulled from the shelves of the Berlin State Library.

Each edition pairs faithful new translations with scholarly introductions that place these works in their historical and cultural context, ensuring that the pioneers of LGBTQ+ literature finally reach the modern readers they were written for.

Emilie Knopf is one of the most obscure figures in 19th-century German literature — not through lack of talent, but through the deliberate suppression of her work. When she published Der Liebe Lust und Leid der Frau zur Frau (Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women) in Berlin in 1895, the novel was swiftly banned under obscenity laws, and Knopf was prosecuted twice for its distribution. The resulting fines and legal pressure effectively silenced her, and her name disappeared from the literary record.

Almost nothing is known of her biography. She left behind no letters, no memoirs, no subsequent publications. For well over a century, she was forgotten — along with the novel she had risked so much to put into the world.

The discovery of a single surviving copy in a Berlin archive has given Knopf's work a second life. Love's Joy and Sorrow Between Women now stands as a remarkable artifact of late 19th-century LGBTQ+ literary history: frank, funny, emotionally sophisticated, and generations ahead of its time. This Ovid Publishing Group edition — the first complete English translation — finally gives Emilie Knopf the readers she never had.

Arthur C. Rauscher is the translator and editor of this edition. His work brings Knopf's original German text into English for the first time in full, accompanied by chapter-by-chapter summaries, historical notes, and a comprehensive introduction placing the novel in its literary and cultural context.