The Natural Daughter is the last of Goethe´s three verse dramas in the classical style, after Iphigenia and Torquato Tasso. Drawing on the real story of a young woman caught up in the French Revolution, it explores the impact of uncontrollable events on ordinary people´s lives. Its present obscurity is partly due to its apparently unfinished state: Goethe planned a second part, which he never wrote. But in its focus on the main character Eugenia ("well-born"), like the Revolution itself a product of the Enlightenment, the play examines the interaction between natural integrity and social compromise.
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