The s was the first decade in the history of Danish literature during which prose was a major player. While Swedish writers, male and female alike, mainly concentrated on classicism and the new sentimentalism in poetry and drama, and members of Det norske Selskab the Norwegian Society focused on entertaining and satirical stories told in verse, Danish writers began taking an interest in the prose genres.
Unlike her contemporaneous Danish colleague Charlotte Baden, the Swedish writer Anna Maria Lenngren preferred to compose her portraits and newspaper satires in verse. Biehl accounted for one of the greatest feats of translation in the form of two works by Cervantes: first El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha ; Eng. Danish writers and a few Norwegian-born writers were swift to learn from the successful foreign novels and stories.
Even though the late eighteenth century still considered the genres of poetry and dramatic art to be the finest and most important, writers and readers alike set doggedly to work in a variety of widely differing prose genres. Volume upon volume, periodical upon periodical, was filled with moral tales, sentimental epistolary novels, and stories told in fictional letters, educative novels, serialisations, prose experiments, and social satire.
Emanuel Balling was a prominent member of Selskabet for Borgerdyd the Society for Civic Virtue ; in , he established a realskole originally, academies for boys for daughters of the middle classes. Family issues and scheming love stories are key to a protracted plot, the mainspring of which is often a dispute concerning a contract of marriage.
Liv og Levnet Beskrivelse , was translated into Danish in and re-translated in The eighteenth-century interest in fostering a new, natural style of letter and epistolary culture was enormously inspirational to writers of moralistic prose. Male and female writers alike used and re-used without ceremony or scruples the many sources of inspiration available to them. Both Baden and Biehl are able to cover many pages with virtuous instruction and sensitive morality, and Biehl in particular sees no reason to save paper.
