Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was one of the major writers of the 20th century: a poet who turned away from poetry, and a prose writer whose great project remained unfinished at the time of her death by fire. Letters to Felician came both chronologically and conceptually just before the fork in the road which divides Bach-mann's career, making it an important document for reading her later work. Passionate declarations of love to a male figure, Felician, these fictional letters are also a hymn to the beauty of southern Austria, underlying Bachmann's utopian visions of her later work.