She was ambitious and self-confident. She was determined, but not at any cost. She lived in the Westphalian province, but not in an ivory tower. She embraced the inner contradictions as well as the external upheavals as challenges and created masterpieces of German literature: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Barbara Beuys paints a portrait in her impressively narrated biography of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff of a woman who persistently and cleverly fought for the space to live her life and pursue her writing.