Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
(published in September / October 2022 in the UK, US, Germany, Netherlands, and Spain - and then later in France, Portugal, Italy, Turkey and Denmark)
From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of rebels who changed the way we think about ourselves and the world. Forget Paris… the real Revolution in the 1790s happened in Jena, a quiet German university town where the unlikely revolutionaries were not soldiers or politicians but poets and playwrights (Goethe, Schiller and Novalis), philosophers (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel), literary critics (the contentious Schlegel brothers) and scientists (Alexander von Humboldt). And at their heart was the formidable and free-spirited Caroline Schlegel. The Jena Set were the first Romantics. And their unconventional lives were laboratories for their radical ideas – about the creative power of the self, the aspirations of art and science, nature and the true meaning of freedom. In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf takes us on a vivid journey through their adventures and misadventures, passionate love affairs and epic quarrels, successes and heartbreak. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self today. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape, but these young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that shaped our modern world.
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Reviews
“An extensively researched, gorgeously written, vibrant, multifaceted, and richly elucidative portrait of a group that "changed our world." – starred review in Booklist
"Their intellectual fireworks were matched by a tangle of literary feuds and hair-raising sexual complications. Here's a piece of the jigsaw of intellectual history that most British people will only vaguely know of if at all – and it's fascinating" – Book Club, The Spectator
“A scintillating group biography’ – The Bookseller
“A spirited re-creation of the world of the German founders of the post-Enlightenment movement … An illuminating exploration of the life of the mind and the sometimes-fraught production of art” – Kirkus Reviews
“An engrossing group biography … a colorful and page-turning intellectual history” - Publishers Weekly
Pre–publication praise for Magnificent Rebels:
“A magnificent book, fascinating in its focus and breathtaking in its scope and sweep. Magnificent Rebels is a work of formidable scholarship worn lightly; of complex intellectual history told evocatively, absorbingly, compellingly. Wulf’s superb prose draws us deeply into the lives and minds of this remarkable circle of people, who together explored the enormous possibilities — and tremendous risks — of free will, individual creativity and liberty." – Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
“The Jena Set was a group of philosophers, artists, and thinkers so earthquakingly brilliant that we feel the tremors that their ideas set off under our feet today… Nobody but Andrea Wulf, with her exquisite grasp of ideas and personalities, with her meticulous, sensitive, and acutely observed prose, could make the reader feel as if they were in the room with them, bearing witness to their insights and their vanities and rages. Her storytelling had me immediately in her thrall.” – Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
"Magnificent Rebels thrums with all the redhot frenzy, wild passion and radical ideas of a free new world created out of poetry, sex, and Romanticism! Wulf's superb group biography of the German Romantics is elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping." – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Catherine the Great and Potemkin
“Andrea Wulf is that rare historian who makes the past feel present and turns distant lives into gripping stories of the human heart. Without doubt, Magnificent Rebels is the best book I’ve read all year. It is an absolute masterpiece: mesmerizing, heartbreaking and incredibly timely, it is an important reminder that the desire to be true to oneself transcends time and borders.” – Amanda Foreman, author of Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire
“Magnificent Rebels is a beautiful group biography, celebrating the lives and loves of Germany’s most brilliant minds: Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Hegel. At the centre of their group in the small university town of Jena was a free-spirited, thrice married, single-mother named Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. She carried her father’s and husbands’ names but her life was entirely her own. Caroline is Andrea Wulf’s soulmate. This is a perfect pairing of author and subject – a joyful, life-affirming, freedom-loving tour de force.” – Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey
“Truly extraordinary… an intellectual history, group portrait, and elegy to Romanticism, which reads at times like a prizewinning novel. You feel you’re there in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Germany, experiencing the debates, disputations, and deep emotional interconnections between the most profound philosophers and greatest writers of the era, as they grapple with the birth of the modern.” – Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great
“After her triumphant open-air biography of the explorer Alexander Humboldt who traversed half the globe, Andrea Wulf brings that same passionate gaze to bear upon a single, tiny late 18th century university town in Germany. The result is a big, thrilling and constantly surprising book – an extraordinarily intimate and down to earth group biography. Wulf’s astonishingly vivid and bustling narrative, moves swiftly from lecture halls and libraries to kitchens and bedrooms, producing an amazing polyphony of youthful ideas and impassioned voices ... Brilliantly orchestrating a mass of original letters, diaries, and archival documents, Wulf revives a whole world of intense friendships, shifting intellectual alliances, furious philosophical arguments, inspirational suppers (including the cooking), theatrical first nights, seductive carriage journeys, hypnotic candlelit lectures and, of course, non-stop love affairs and betrayals (including the ecstatic love-making and equally ecstatic rows) . . . It is a glorious piece of work, both thought-provoking and magical, and I loved it.” – Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder