The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Muller produced some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular the song cycle Die schoene Mullerin. Professor Youens shows us how this archetypal tale of love and rejection, which has its origins in medieval romance, Minnesong and popular German legend, is reflected in the poet's own experience, the realms of art and life intertwining. Professor Youens considers other poets' explorations of the theme of a miller maid and her suitors, and looks at other musical settings of Muller's mill poems. But above all she examines Muller's permutation of the literary legends as an exploration of erotic obsession, delusion, frenzy, disillusionment and death and the way in which Schubert crucially altered Muller's vision when the poetic cycle became a musical text.