Women writers contributed to the philosophy of German Romanticism by challenging rigid dichotomies of classs, gender, and ethnicity. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina Brentano von Arnim provided a model for shaping intellectual life in the modern world while retheorizing the concepts of love.