The writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé fascinates because of her associations with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud and because she was active in the cultural and intellectual life of late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany and Austria. This study analyzes how Andreas-Salomé depicted women in her fictional works just as feminism was emerging, revealing a complex engagement with questions of narrative and identity. More than mere thematic explorations of women's changing roles in society, her works investigate the concept of identity and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and narrative representation. She is as concerned with a cultural crisis of femininity and masculinity as with the identity crises of her individual women characters.