Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) spent five years in Germany (1800-1805) and became deeply informed about its Romantic literature and philosophy, then at its height in that country. In the course of his enthusiastic embrace of the German language and culture Robinson built up an intellectual and literary capital that he would draw on for the rest of his long life. The main thrust of this critical and biographical study is to demonstrate that Robinson is an important nineteenth-century life writer, and that his autobiographical writings, a large portion of which are still in manuscript, deserve to be taken seriously by students and scholars of autobiography, and to be published in a new edition. Since to date no one has focused on Robinson the life writer, this study of Robinson's German years draws on his published letters, diaries, and reminiscences as well as some manuscript material.

Although Robinson is mostly remembered for having cultivated the acquaintance of many of the leading writers of his time in Germany and England, when he died he left behind what may well be the most extensive life writing collection by a nineteenth-century English individual. The most ample selection from the manuscript collection is still Thomas Sadler's Diaries, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (1869). His biographer Edith Morley has also published several collections, including an important selection of his letters from Germany (1929), and Hertha Marquardt, in her exhaustive study of Robinson's personal and intellectual relationship with Germany, includes selections from previously unpublished correspondence and journals. The labors of Sadler, Morley, and Marquardt have in fact made available a large selection of Robinson's work that has substantial literary, historical, and autobiographical value and that justifies the assumption of this study that it is high time that we recognize Robinson not only as a valuable source of firsthand information about other nineteenth-century writers, but also as a versatile and gifted life writer in his own right. His accomplishments in this area are varied and impressive, and especially so during his transformative years in Germany.

The book will be of interest to students of autobiography and life writing as well as specialists in Romantic literature and Anglo-German literary relations. The book includes sections on Robinson and nineteenth-century autobiography, on the different stages of Robinson's five years in Germany, including his initial stay in Frankfurt; his personal friendships and first meeting with literary lions; his days as a Jena student and aspiring "literator"; his contacts with Weimar; and his role as a philosophical informant for Mme de Stael on her visit there; his return to England and the failure of his hopes of achieving the professional literary career that he had dreamed about in Germany.

Eugene Stelzig is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo, where he has taught since 1972 and where he also served as Chair of the English Department (1997-2001). He was born in Austria and educated there and in France before coming to the U.S. in 1961. He holds degrees in English from the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University (King's College), and Harvard University (PhD 1972). In addition to nearly forty articles on romantic and modern literature and autobiography, he has published books on Wordsworth (1975), Hermann Hesse (1988), and Rousseau and Goethe (2000), and has edited a collection of articles on Romantic Autobiography in England (2009). He has also published poetry (including Fool's Gold: Selected Poems of a Decade, 2008) and translations of German poetry as well as several autobiographical essays.