In contrast to most of her famous contemporaries, Droste-Hülshoff shunned publicity, with the result that most of her oeuvre remained unpublished during her lifetime. For this portion of her work, an editor has to construct the texts from posthumous manuscripts. The resultant editorial problems were not satisfactorily resolved in the recognised critical edition of Droste-Hülshoff's works dating back to 1925-1930, which is outdated in every respect and in addition has long been out of print.
Finally, Droste-Hülshoff has a second idiosyncrasy which makes the provision of an historical-critical edition particularly urgent. Droste-Hülshoff often did not really finish her texts in manuscript, but left various possibilities open, without really deciding on one rather than the other. The consequences of this basic indecisiveness, particularly for posthumous texts, for which the editor had to decide on one particular version for the text edition, can only be fully realised within a historical-critical edition which in its critical apparatus fully documents the genesis of the texts using extant manuscripts and prints. It is here in particular that the new material is brought to bear which the editor, the Germanist Winfried Woesler, and his research team processed in the course of years of preparatory work.
This historical-critical edition, of the works and correspondence of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848), prepared according to modern editorial principles, was finally completed at the end of 2000 after 22 years of work. The edition comprises a total of 28 volumes (14 volumes with part-volumes).

This is the second and final volume of the letters to Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. It covers the years 1841-1848 and completes the edition of her entire correspondence inasfar as it is extant or traceable. The letters collected here, many of which have never been published before, cast light both on Droste-Hülshoff's socio-historical background and on the position she held in the literary world of her time.