The Artificial Silk Girl is a rare portrait of the life of a young German woman at a time when the force of modernity in the Western world was at its most potent: with technology exploding and women freely entering the workforce, a new and frightening sense of existential individuality emerged. In the days before the Nazis came to power and suspended the development of German culture, Doris is a character whose irony and psychological insight startlingly mirror those of her contemporaries in France, England and America.