Author's Portrait: Laure Conan

Laure Conan, ca. 1870

In a time when writing was still widely considered a male profession, the courage and stamina of women who despite all obstacles and polemics aspired to become authors can only be called admirable. What made them go public with their stories, essays etc. wasn’t always the strong yearning to share them with less biased readers than family and friends, nor the overpowering desire to show to the world that they were just as able writers as their male contemporaries, but in many cases necessity and desperation drove them to try a literary way out of misery. One of these women was the French-Canadian novelist, biographer and journalist Laure Conan who was the first in her country who actually managed to live from the pen.

Author's Portrait: Amalie Skram

Amalie Skram (1846-1905)
 Source: Wikimedia Commons
scan from Samlede Værker
[Collected Works]
by Amalie Skram

Past Sunday, on 15 March 2015, was the 110th anniversary of the death of Amalie Skram, one of the foremost women writers and feminists that Norway saw in the nineteenth century. Her books were subject to much controversy in her time because they openly branded the often lamentable living conditions of women in patriarchal Norwegian society. Many of her works are still in print in Norway and the neighbouring countries, but outside Skandinavia Amalie Skram is little known today although – to my great surprise – at least five of her novels and the correspondence with her second husband Erik Skram are available in not too old English translations.

Author's Portrait: Robert Musil

Robert Musil in 1900

Among Austrian writers of the early twentieth century there is one who is now often mentioned in one breath with the great modernists James Joyce and Marcel Proust although his fame never reached the same heights, least of all during his lifetime. Like them he is chiefly remembered today for the monumental novel which represents his life’s work and which only few have read in its entirety. The author, of course, is Robert Musil and the opus magnum in question is The Man Without Qualities which actually happens to be jus a fragment because the author died during work on the third volume. Here’s my portrait of this exceptional Austrian writer who was always grieved by not getting the attention that he deserved.

Author's Portrait: Marchesa Colombi

The nineteenth century was a hard time for women wishing to be taken seriously as writers. The Italian Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli Viollier was one of those who succeeded although it wasn’t sung at her cradle either that one day she would be a noted and widely-read author. Like many of her female contemporaries she wrote under pseudonym, but instead of choosing a male one her sense of humour made her borrow the name of a character from the comedy La satira e Parini (1858; The Satire and Parini) by Paolo Ferrari, namely of the female part of a frivolous and vicious couple of small gentry. After first having used the name just for fun she became Marchesa Colombi for good in 1877. The life of the prolific and yet almost forgotten Italian writer deserves a closer look.

Author's Portrait: E. T. A. Hoffmann

E. T. A. Hoffmann ca. 1800
painted by an unidentified artist 
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were an important era for literature. It was the time of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism, a highly innovative literary movement altogether and in Germany in particular. Up to this day several German writers of the period are well remembered and read in schools (at least occasionally) as well as by classic lovers of all ages. The most prominent names of German Romanticism are Achim von Arnim, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The last had a strong and lasting impact on literature paving the way for the fantasy, horror and crime genres.

Author’s Portrait: Maria Firmina dos Reis

Already earlier this year I remarked that Brazil was a bit of a blank on my literary world map although the country is huge and counts millions of inhabitants. As a matter of fact, her literature receives little attention abroad. Maybe this is due to the fact that Brazil’s official language is the local variety of Portuguese and I noticed that translations from this language aren’t particularly present on the international book market. Despite all there are of course notable Brazilian writers apart from Paulo Coelho, contemporary as well as classic ones. There even was a nineteenth-century woman writer, moreover one with African roots, who enjoyed some renown in her time. Her name was Maria Firmina dos Reis and this portrait is dedicated to her.

Author’s Portrait: Adalbert Stifter

Literature is an art bound to culture and language. Thus it often happens that an author who is famous in his own cultural and linguistic environment remains unknown in other parts of the world. I have made it my mission to present some of them, notably writers from before 1900. Among important Austrian authors who don’t get much attention outside Austria or German-speaking countries (anymore), I already portrayed Bertha von Suttner (who is better known as a peace activist) and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Today I want to spotlight Adalbert Stifter, a leading figure of Austrian Biedermeier literature. Despite his lasting fame in the German-speaking world, it seems that most of his work is still waiting to be discovered abroad.

Author's Portrait: Aphra Behn

"Aphra Behn," by Sir Peter Lely
oil on canvas, ca. 1670.
Courtesy of the Yale Center for
British Art, Yale University,
New Haven, Connecticut.

There are many interesting figures among writers whose work is in the public domain. Today I want to shed light on an Englishwoman from the seventeenth century who caused quite some polemic among her contemporaries and who was even vilified by later – more prudish – generations for her “indecent” writings. Her work was only rediscovered in the early twentieth century and she was recognised since as a key playwright of the English Restoration, a notable poet and an important pioneer of the modern English novel committed to realism. She also was England’s first professional woman writer and a person surrounded by a certain amount of mystery. Her name is Aphra Behn.

Based on few existing sources biographers assume that Aphra Behn must have been born as Aphra Johnson in Canterbury, England, or close by before 14 December 1640, but her origins remain largely in the dark and nothing can be said for sure about them. Although it’s the most probable supposition, it isn’t even certain that she was called Johnson after all since already her contemporaries ascribed different maiden names to her. That her father was a barber, however, seems to be a fairly established fact passed on to us through the centuries.

Hardly any information on Aphra Behn’s childhood and youth is available. That her knowledge of French and Latin enabled her later on to translate books into English, hints at a good education. It’s also probable that she lived in Dutch Guiana in the West Indies, ie in Surinam, at least for a while because her writings show that she was well acquainted with the conditions there, especially with slavery. It was said that she travelled to Surinam with her parents and siblings during the first phase of the English Civil War in 1663 and that her father died on the way. Other sources suggest that she may have worked as a spy for the English crown there.

By 1664 Aphra Behn was back to England where she married the merchant Johan Behn – provided that he ever existed. No records about the man of Dutch or German descent or about the wedding could be found yet and rumour had it that she invented him altogether to comply with social conventions that discriminated against women, especially unmarried ones, or even to obscure her identity. Most biographers assume, though, that the marriage took place in fact and that Johan Behn died the following year. Soon afterwards, during the second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-67, she went to Antwerp, Netherlands, as a political spy, but instead of providing her with a living, the activity plunged her into debt. It seems that she never received the money that King Charles II. owed her and she may even have served time in the debtor’s prison. A warrant for her arrest survived.

After the unlucky experience in the service of the King, Aphra Behn set her hopes on writing. She had been making verses all along, but eventually tried her hand at commercially more promising plays since the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell was over and theatres were re-opening at last. As it turned out, she had a talent for it and became the leading playwright of the English Restoration. Already her first performed plays, The Forc’d Marriage (1670) and The Amorous Prince (1671), were a big success. They were followed by another seventeen more or less popular plays: The Dutch Lover (1673), Abdelazer (1676), The Town Fop (1676), The Rover – Part 1 (1677) and Part 2 (1681), Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feigned Courtesans (1679), The Young King (1679), The False Count (1681), The Roundheads (1681), The City Heiress (1682), Like Father, Like Son (1682), Prologue and Epilogue to Romulus and Hersilia, or The Sabine War (1682), The Emperor of the Moon (1687), and posthumously staged The Widow Ranter (1689) and The Younger Brother (1696). Together with composer John Blow she also wrote The Lucky Chance (1686).

Although some of Aphra Behn’s plays, notably The Rover – Part 1 and Part 2, were much loved by the audience and quite profitable, her work for the theatre never made her rich and she dedicated herself increasingly to poetry and narration. In 1684 she published the much admired volume of poetry titled Poems upon Several Occasions, with A Voyage to the Island of Love and brought out the novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister which saw several reprints, too. This early epistolary novel was so popular that the author wrote two sequels to it: Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Second Part (1685) and The Amours of Philander and Silvia (1687).

The best-known narrative work of Aphra Behn up to this day is the tragic love story of an enslaved African prince around whom revolves the short novel Oroonoko. It first appeared in print in 1688, both as a single edition and in a collection titled Three Histories (along with the novellas The Fair Jilt and Agnes de Castro). Thanks to its realism and its influence on later novels, Oroonoko is seen today as an important milestone in the development of the modern English novel. Also in 1688 the author brought out another volume of poetry Lycidus; or, The Lover in Fashion and the short story The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker.

The fact that her dramatic work, her poetry and her fiction provided Aphra Behn with a livelihood allowed her as the first Englishwoman ever to call herself with full right a writer by profession – and she was the first who did it with pride which shocked her contemporaries, male and female. Her creative work, however, could never fully relieve her from poverty and debt, and so she like many others in a similar situation also translated French and Latin books into English for a living. The last years of her life were overshadowed by growing pain and stiff as well as deformed joints, probably due to rheumatoid arthritis, but her financial situation forced her to continue to write indefatigably until the end.

Aphra Behn died in London on 16 April 1689 and was buried at Poet’s Corner in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. In the essay A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf called upon “all women together … to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, …, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

The works of Aphra Behn are available online as free e-books on different websits like just for instance Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks.

If you wish to know more about this important figure of English literature, I recommend the following biographies:

Janet Todd: The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (2013)

George Woodcock: The English Sappho (1989)

Author's Portrait: Jens Peter Jacobsen

As regards literature, Northern Europe has been fertile ground ever since the old Norse sagas were written down, notably the Icelandic Edda. The fact that fifteen authors from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature between 1901 and 2013 tells of a vivid narrative tradition. In fact, the names of Scandinavians can be found on bestseller lists regularly, but of course there are important classical writers from the region, too. Every bibliophile will at least have heard of Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, and Sigrid Undset – to name just a few –, but how about Jens Peter Jacobsen, a late contemporary and fellow-countryman of Hans Christian Andersen?

Jens Peter Jacobsen was born into the family of a wealthy merchant in Thisted at the western end of the Limfjord in Jutland, Denmark, on 7 April 1847. He was the oldest of five children and early showed exceptional talent as well as passion both for science and literature, a double penchant which is visible in all his work. As a sixteen-year-old he moved to Copenhagen to finish secondary school and stayed there to study botany at university. He was a gifted scientist and in 1873, although he had never taken any exams, he presented his outstanding dissertation on freshwater algae which was rewarded with the prestigious Golden Medal of the University of Copenhagen. 

As a student Jens Peter Jacobsen became immediately fascinated by the still recent discoveries of Charles Darwin and, over a period of about five years, translated into Danish for the first time two of his key works, namely On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He also wrote scientific articles for a radical Danish journal to promote and establish Darwin’s ideas in the north of Europe where they were hardly known until then. In addition his engagement in the Theory of Evolution helped the young man to get over disappointment in love and a deep religious crisis and it led him to adopt the atheistic, ie naturalistic view of the world which is reflected in his literary work. 

It was with a short story titled Mogens that Jens Peter Jacobsen made his debut as a writer in 1872. Since already in this first published literary work man is shown as an animal that can’t but follow its nature, it was considered highly revolutionary at the time. The story, however, is admired above all for its strong impressionistic language. In the early 1870s the author also set out to write Marie Grubbe. A Lady of the Seventeenth Century (Fru Marie Grubbe), a historical novel based on a Danish noblewoman who gave up her station to become the wife of a ferryman and be happy, but due to his scientific and translation work along with failing health it wasn’t finished before 1876. 

Already in 1873, during a travel around Italy, Jens Peter Jacobsen was severely struck with tuberculosis which cast a shadow on the rest of his life preventing him from pursuing his plans for the future. As from the mid-1870s he gave up for good science and fully devoted himself to literature. He returned to Thisted to live with his family and travelled to the South, especially Italy and France, repeatedly for reasons of health. He wrote his second novel titled Niels Lyhne, a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman about a young man who loses his faith and becomes an atheist, and published it in 1880. By then his health had deteriorated already considerably. 

After 1880 Jens Peter Jacobsen’s poor health no longer allowed him to write much. He finished a few tales like A Shot in the Fog (Et Skud i Taagen: 1875), Two Worlds (To Verdener: 1879) or The Plague in Bergamo (Pesten i Bergamo), There Should Have Been Roses (Fra Skitsebogen) and Mrs. Fonss (Fru Fønss) which he brought out in a collection, together with his first published work, under the title Mogens and Other Stories (Mogens og andre Noveller) in 1882. These stories, like all other literary works of the author, are characterised by an extremely precise and introspective style which uses to be labelled as naturalistic. Because their plots are made up of a string of picturesque scenes which remind of great impressionistic paintings his writing is also referred to as impressionistic. 

On 30 April 1885 Jens Peter Jacobsen died from consumption, as tuberculosis was often called then because it visibly ate up the body, in his family’s home in Thisted. Some of his late works, notably his poems were published posthumously and widely read not just in Denmark, but also abroad, above all in Germany. 

The influence of Jens Peter Jacobsen on other writers has been enormous, especially in Scandinavia and Germany. Rainer Maria Rilke is known to have been particularly passionate about his work because he mentioned him in his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, which were later published as Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter: 1929). Of course, he had the advantage of speaking Danish. Also Thomas Mann was well acquainted with the innovative work of the Danish author. In his novella Tonio Kröger from 1903 the parallels to Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne are particularly obvious. Thus it is justified to call the Dane an important precursor of German symbolism. 

Since Jens Peter Jacobsen has been dead for almost 130 years, all his writings are in the public domain. English translations of his novels Marie Grubbe from 1917 and Niels Lyhne from 1919 as well as the collection Mogens and Other Stories from 1921 can be downloaded as free e-books from ManyBooks.net.

Author's Portrait: Olive Schreiner

These days there is little to be heard about South Africa with respect to literature. Of course, there are recently deceased Nadine Gordimer and John Maxwell Coetzee who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 and 2003 respectively and whose work keeps being read around the globe, but how many names of other authors from South Africa come to mind at once? Although the official language of the country is English, which makes access to the international reading community so much easier, the fame of only few contemporary writers like André Brink has spread across her borders. I know even less names of South African authors from the times of the British Empire, but it goes without saying that there were some excellent ones. One of them was Olive Schreiner. 

Olive Schreiner was born on 24 March 1855 in Bosutoland, Cape Colony, British Empire (today: Lesotho). Her parents were missionaries working at the Wesleyan Missionary Society station at Wittebergen Reserve, in the Eastern Cape ever since 1837. Due to the father’s low salary and his lack of common sense in financial matters, the numerous family suffered great poverty. The situation got even worse after he was expelled from his post because he had started trading which was against the missionary regulations. Eventually, Olive and two of her siblings were sent to live with their older brother Theophilus, who had just been appointed headmaster in Cradock in 1867, where they attended school for the first time. 

Already during those early years, Olive Schreiner began to question her family’s strong religious belief and completely rejected their creed at the age of 15. To free herself and to escape from the constant quarrels at home, she became a governess. She read the works of Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin which strongly influenced her view of the world and of religion. This first period away from the family didn’t last long, though. After a brief engagement, the young woman returned first to her brothers working on the Kimberley diamond fields and then to her parents. It was then, when she first fell ill with asthma, an illness that would accompany and handicap her for the rest of her life. 

While living with her family, Olive Schreiner set out to write her first novel, Undine, but soon her family’s increasingly difficult financial situation forced her to hire herself out again as a governess. In her free time she continued to write and produced the semi-autobiographical Story of an African Farm as well as a collection of short stories and allegories titled Dream Life and Real Life. Since writing was just a hobby for her at the time, she didn’t try to publish them. In 1880 she could finally afford moving to Scotland to begin training as a nurse. Later she attended Women's Medical School in London to become a doctor. Her life was meant to take a very different turn, though, because the English climate made her asthma become chronic and eventually she had to accept that her poor health would never allow her to practice medicine or only to finish her studies. 

As from that moment Olive Schreiner set her hopes on writing and offered Story of an African Farm to several English publishing houses which all rejected it. Only in 1883 the quality of the book was recognised and later the same year it appeared in print for the first time. To escape the common prejudices against a woman writer, it was brought out under the male pseudonym Ralph Irons, though. The novel was received with immediate acclaim by literary critics and feminists alike. The famous sexologist Havelock Ellis was so impressed by the book that he wrote a letter to the author which was the beginning of a mutually inspiring and long-lasting friendship. 

During her studies in London Olive Schreiner had got into touch with the socialist movement and made friends with some of its leading figures like for instance Edward Carpenter, Eleanor Marx, Bruce Glasier and George Bernard Shaw. After her success as a writer she joined several discussion groups and different progressive organisations where she advocated women’s equality. As a freethinker she was in her element there and her later work was strongly influenced by the ideas discussed there. In 1886 Olive Schreiner left England to travel Switzerland, France and Italy. She used her free time to begin writing her novel From Man to Man, several allegories which were published in journals and an introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 

Back in England she soon decided to return to South Africa. In 1889 she settled down in Karoo at the town of Matjiesfontein where the air was better for her health. Also there she got soon involved in politics, especially feminist and human rights movements, and met the politically active farmer Samuel Cronwright. At the same time she resumed publishing. She brought out the short story collections Dreams (1890) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893). 

Pushing aside doubts about being able to adapt to married life, Olive Schreiner became the wife of Samuel Cronwright in 1894, who took the name Cronwright-Schreiner, and hoped to have a family. Their marriage remained childless, though, since the only child who was ever born to them alive died after only a few hours. Before long Olive Schreiner’s feeble health also urged the couple to give up the farm and to move houses often until they finally settled down in Johannesburg in 1898. 

In collaboration with her husband, who shared her political views on the “native question”, Olive Schreiner wrote a political pamphlet titled The Political Situation in Cape Colony (1895). Out of disappointment over the politics of Cecil John Rhodes she brought out a satirical allegorical tale under the title Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). When the Boer war was looming, whe wrote An English South African Woman's View of the Situation, a critique on the Transvaal difficulty from the pro-Boer position (1899) in which she stood up for Boer interests and advocated a peaceful solution of the conflict. 

After 1900 Olive Schreiner’s health was further deteriorating, since the frequent asthma attacks had affected her heart and caused angina pectoris. Despite all she continued to be politically active and to write. She published A Letter on the Jew (1906) and Closer Union: a Letter on South African Union and the Principles of Government (1909). In 1911 she finished and released at last her book Women and Labour which she had begun when she was still living in England. In 1913 the author travelled to England for medical treatment and was prevented from returning home by the outbreak of World War I. Inspired by the carnage in Europe, she set out to write another book, her last one, which was later published in an abbreviated version as The Dawn of Civilisation. 

After the end of World War I Olive Schreiner returned to South Africa. She died in Wynberg, South Africa, on 11 December 1920. A collection of articles from the early 1890s about country and people was published posthumously under the title Thoughts on South Africa (1923) like Stories, Dreams and Allegories (1923). Also her novels From Man to Man and Undine were published only after her death, in 1926 and 1929 respectively. 

The novels, social and political treatises, allegorical tales and short stories of Olive Schreiner have entered into the European public domain almost twenty-five years ago. Some of her works are available as free e-books on the Project Gutenberg site and on ManyBooks.net.

Author's Portrait: Camilo Castelo Branco

Portugal is a small and unobtrusive country in the southwesternmost corner of the Iberian Peninsula – and Europe. One of her most prominent and prolific nineteenth-century writers was Camilo Castelo Branco, first Visconde de Correia Botelho, whose books have remained popular long after his death in 1890 and are still read in Portuguese schools sometimes. He was a master of romance, but despite the lasting fame he enjoys in his country his name is virtually unknown outside Portugal and other parts of the Lusitanian world. This is reason enough for me to write his portrait today.

Author's Portrait: Eliza Orzeszkowa

Eliza Orzeszkowa in 1900

In 1909 the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, but she wasn’t the only and above all not the first woman nominated for it. Hardly anyone is aware of the fact that already four years earlier, in 1905, the Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa had been a runner-up for the prestigious award competing with no lesser authors than Leo Tolstoy and Henryk Sienkiewicz. It was a close decision between the three, in the end she didn’t get it, though (nor did Leo Tolstoy). Eliza Orzeszkowa was nominated for the Literature Nobel Prize again in 1909 and lost it once more because Selma Lagerlöf was given preference over her.

As far as I can tell, Eliza Orzeszkowa as the Polish pioneer of literary positivism and an important social spokeswoman is up to this day held in high esteem in Poland, but for the rest her literary work is largely forgotten and most of her books will be available only in very old translations archived in the darkest corners of crammed libraries. Thus I reckon that her name rings a bell only with a few passionate lovers of nineteenth-century European literature who stumbled over a free e-book on the internet or over the new translation of On the Niemen released just recently. I believe that Eliza Orzeszkowa deserves better and decided to draw attention to her life and her work.

Author's Portrait: Dezső Kosztolányi

On a literary map of the world Hungary certainly isn’t the first European country that catches the eye. In fact, there aren’t an awful lot of Hungarian writers who managed to attract enough attention to be translated into other languages. Of course, there is Imre Kertész who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 (»»» read my review of his Kaddish for an Unborn Child), but who else? The names of Ágota Kristof, Sándor Márai, Magda Szabó and Pál Závada come to my mind. In the first half of the twentieth century Margit Kaffka and Antal Szerb earned fame outside their country along with Dezső Kosztolányi whom I wish to portray today. 

Author's Portrait: Emilia Pardo Bazán

Having a look back at the past two hundred years, it can be noticed that literature underwent a remarkable change not just in style and topics, but also regarding its authors who became socially more diverse. Particularly apparent is the fact that from the late eighteenth century on ever more women writers emerged from the shadows of patriarchal societies, notably in Europe. In more conservative, especially Roman-Catholic countries the development may have lagged behind, but there too women writers entered the scene sooner or later. A Spanish woman who gained renown as a writer in the late nineteenth century was Emilia Pardo Bazán. 

Author's Portrait: Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

The European picture of Muslim women tends to be strongly connected with oppression and exploitation. Consequently, Muslim women writers seem to be a contradiction in terms, but the truth may rather be that they just don’t get much attention here because we are too complacent to struggle with trying to understand a cultural setting so different from ours. In fact, they always existed, if only in secret and telling their stories rather than writing them down. In the early twentieth century a Bengali woman writer, feminist and social worker acquired lasting esteem in her country: Roquia Sakhawat Hussain or simply Begum Rokeya.

Roquia Sakhawat Hussain (aka Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein – Latin transcriptions of the name differ) was born as Roquia Khatun in the small village Pairabondh in Rangpur, Bengal, British India (now: Bangladesh), in the year 1880, on 9 December according to her nephew. As a great landowner her father belonged to the Indian upper class and he was also a highly educated man with a sound knowledge of several languages including English, but at the same time he was a very conservative Muslim who held up the traditional ways of life and observed the purdah. Roquia’s mother was the first of his four wives and had yet another five children, two girls and three boys.

Unlike her two surviving brothers who were sent to school (first in the neighbourhood and later in Calcutta, now Kolkata) to receive a modern education qualifying them for an honourable career in the British civil service, Roquia and her sisters were more or less confined to home in order not to be seen by any man except their closest male relatives, nor by women who didn’t belong to the family network. With the help of their brothers and behind the back of their father the girls managed despite all to get a better education than most others at the time. Above all they learned in addition to their native Urdu the local language Bengla and English which was considered as improper for girls because it brought them into touch with non-Muslim ideas.

On the initiative of her eldest brother sixteen-year-old Roquia was married to Syed Sakhawat Hussain who was twice her age, but a very liberal-minded man thanks to having been educated in Patna, Calcutta (now: Kolkata) and London. As the Deputy Magistrate of Bhagalpur he was convinced that it needed well-educated women for progress. Therefore he gave his wife private lessons to further her education (especially in English and in Bengla) and encouraged her to make friends with non-Muslim women, to read broadly and to write in Bengla. In this respect she had more luck than her gifted elder sister who had been married off at the age of fourteen and who had to overcome many obstacles to become a Bengal poet of some renown later on.

 In 1901, with the blessing and support of her husband, Roquia Sakhawat Hussain began her career as a writer. Under the name Mrs. RS Hossain she published many articles on women’s issues and short stories in different newspapers and magazines. Her essay Pipasha (Thirst) came out in 1902, a first volume of collected essays titled Motichur followed in 1904. Best known in the west is her utopian short-story Sultana’s Dream (Sultanar Swopno) which was first published in the Indian Ladies' Magazine in Madras in 1905. It’s a very early work of feminist science-fiction in which female and male roles are reversed and it has become a classic.

Although her husband died on 3 May 1909, Roquia Sakhawat Hussain continued the feminist work that she had begun with his encouragement and support. In his memory she established a school primarily for Muslim women in Bhagalpur which she had to move to Calcutta (now: Kolkata) two years later because of a property dispute with her late husband’s family. The Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School in Kolkata still exists and has a good reputation. In 1916 she also co-founded the Bengla Islamic Women's Association advocating different reforms, especially with regard to gender equality. Those activities made her popularly known as Begum Rokeya, “Begum” being the honorific title for a Muslim woman.

She explained her untiring efforts for the benefit of women:

“We constitute one half of the society and if we are left behind, how can the society progress? If a person’s one leg is tired, how far can he go? The interests of men and women are the same. The goal of life is the same for both”. 

Along with her work at school and for the Bengali Islamic Women’s Association she continued writing in a wide spectrum of genres. Her short stories, poems, essays, novels and satires display great creativity and logic as well as a pronounced sense of humour. In 1918 she published a volume of poetry titled Saogat. The second volume of Motichur came out in 1922 and includes different kinds of essays, short stories and fairy tales like Nurse Nelly, Jvan-phal (The Fruit of Knowledge), Mukti-phal (The Fruit of Emancipation), Nari-Sristi (Creation of Women). Notable among her later works are also the feminist utopian novel Paddorag (Essence of the Lotus) from 1924, Oborodhbashini (The Woman in Captivity) from 1931 which she dedicated to her mother, and her unfinished essay Narir Adhikar (The Rights of Women).

At the age of only fifty-two years Roquia Sakhawat Hussain died from heart problems in Calcutta (now: Kolkata), British India (now: Bangladesh), on 9 December 1932. The anniversary of her death is celebrated as Rokeya Dibosh (Rokeya Day) in Bangladesh.

To download Roquia Sakhawat Hussain’s utopian short-story Sultana’s Dream as a free e-book please click here.

For want of a printed English-language biography of Roquia Sakhawat Hussain I refer to the following websites (all retrieved in March 2014) for more information about the Bengla writer and feminist:

• Wikipedia - Roquia Sakhawat Hussain
• Bangladesh Golden Book - Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain 
• Londoni - Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain
• Sewal-Belmont House & Museum - Women We Celebrate - Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein

Veza Canetti

There can be no doubt that the name Canetti is well-famed in the world of literature. Elias Canetti it goes without saying since it was he who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. However, there’s also an Austrian writer carrying the family name: Veza Canetti, the first wife of the famous Nobel Prize laureate. Of course, she is present in some of his essays as well as in his autobiographies and after her death he dedicated all his publications to her, but the literary picture that the acclaimed author painted of her is strongly tinged by female ideals of the 1920s and 1930s. Veza Canetti appears as “literary muse”, “oriental princess”, “jealous partner”, “melancholic raven”, and “sacrificing woman without own ambitions”. That she happened to be a talented writer doesn’t seem to have mattered to the great man of letters. 

Veza Canetti was born as Venetiana Taubner-Calderón in Vienna, then Austria-Hungary, on 21 November 1897. Her father was an Ashkenazi-Jewish merchant from Hungary who died when she was six years old. Her mother, a descendent of Spanish-Sephardic Jews who had settled down on the Balkans, more precisely in Belgrade, Serbia, soon remarried to be provided for with her daughter. Little is known about Veza’s childhood and youth, but despite a physical defect – she had no left forearm so her hand was joined directly to the elbow – those forming years seem to have been quite ordinary. The girl graduated from a grammar school in Vienna and often visited her numerous relatives on the British Isles to improve her English. Besides, she applied herself to studying French, Spanish and Italian on her own. 

After the end of the Great War In 1918 Veza Taubner-Calderón worked as an English teacher at a private grammar school in Vienna until it was closed four years later. After that the young woman made her living as a translator into German and giving private English lessons. She also attended lectures of Karl Kraus (one of the grand men of Austrian literature at the time known today above all for his play The Last Days of Mankind from 1918) at the university of Vienna where she met her husband-to-be, Elias Canetti, in 1924. In the early 1930s Elias Canetti began working on his first (and only fiction) novel Auto-da-fé and also Veza turned her attention to writing. With the help of one of her students, she made her literary debut with a short story in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung, a newspaper of the social-democratic party in Vienna, in 1932. 

During the following two years Veza Taubner-Calderón continued to publish in different newspapers and anthologies. Being Jewish, however, she could not use her real name, but had to resort to different pseudonyms like Veza Magd, Veronika Knecht, Martha/Martina/Marina/Martin Murner. Her rather radical short stories drawn from everyday life touched on burning issues like poverty, unemployment, abuse of power, humiliation, and violence within the family which wasn’t welcome after the events of February 1934 (Austrian Civil War and takeover of power by Austrofascists with conservative Catholic-patriotic ideals as answer to rising National-Socialism under Hitler in Germany). Veza’s novel titled Die gelbe Straße could not be released as planned anymore and the Jewish socialist writer had little opportunity to further publish her work. 

In 1934 Veza Taubner-Calderón married Elias Canetti and adopted his family name as required Austrian law. It is known that Veza wrote two not yet found novels, Kaspar Hauser and Die Genießer, until November 1938 when the Canettis fled via Paris, France, to London, U.K., where they settled down in 1939. In exile Veza Canetti produced Die Schildkröten, but couldn’t find a publisher for the novel. Since earning a living became a pressing issue, Veza put aside her own ambitions and worked as a translator from English again. For the rest she contented herself with supporting her husband’s work as his muse, literary assistant and sometimes secretary although he had several intense affairs. As it seems, Veza Canetti lost all hope for a breakthrough as a writer by 1956 and rumour has it that she not only gave up writing altogether, but also destroyed many of her manuscripts. 

Veza Canetti died in London, U.K., on 1 May 1963. The little that remains of her literary heritage has been (re)discovered and (re)published only in the 1990s and in the new millennium. Available in English are her novels Yellow Street: A Novel in Five Scenes (Die gelbe Straße: 1990) and The Tortoises (Die Schildkröten: 1998), plus the collection Viennese Short Stories (including among others the early stories from the German-language collection Geduld bringt Rosen: 1995). In German also the play Der Oger (1991) and more short stories Der Fund  (2001) have been brought out. 

For further reading I recommend the following biography:
Julian E. Preece (2007) The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband. Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture. Camden House, Rochester USA ISBN 9781571133533

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens in 1855
oil on canvas, by the
French artist Ary Scheffer.
Courtesy of the
National Portrait Gallery,
London

There are few writers whose name is so closely linked to Christmas as that of Charles Dickens. Who doesn’t know his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, the first and most famous of his Christmas books? One of these days many will have read the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts of past, present and future or they will have watched one of its countless screen adaptations. This has become quite a tradition, almost like reading the Christmas gospel. Charles Dickens’s four other Christmas books, however, are less known to readers worldwide although they are impressive stories as well. They are The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and the largely autobiographical novel The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848). 

Neatly wrapped Charles Dickens’s novels surely found their way under many a Christmas tree this year, too. Although they are nineteenth century works they keep being popular presents – classics in the best sense of the word. Dickens lovers, of course, welcome them with great joy, but children and teenagers often tend to look at them with some distaste because Victorian literature isn’t actually very much in fashion today. Moreover they are books that remind of school, that look lengthy and that are difficult to read because their English is antiquated. I must admit that I’ve read only few works of Dickens because I’m more interested in twentieth century and contemporary writers. Nonetheless I devoured the first three Christmas Books (1843-1845) and Hard Times (1854). They were wonderful and inspiring reads! Great Expectations (1860/61) is on my pile of books to read. 

Unarguably Charles Dickens is one of the greatest authors of the Victorian age and he was very prolific, too. However, I’m pretty sure that nobody would have expected such a career when he was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England/U.K., on 7 February 1812. He was the second child of a clerk in the Naval Pay Office who had another six children with this wife in subsequent years and a habit of living beyond his means. The family soon moved to Bloomsbury in London and later to Chatham in Kent where the father was transferred respectively. Until Charles Dickens was eleven, he enjoyed a happy childhood with much freedom roaming fields, reading popular novels and attending school for a while. Following financial difficulties the family moved to Camden Town in London in 1822. Two years later his father’s debts got completely out of control and made a traumatic end to Charles Dickens’s carefree existence. 

While the rest of the family was forced to move into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London, in 1824, twelve-year-old Charles Dickens was taken from school and sent to Warren's Blacking Warehouse to earn not just his own living, but also to help satisfy his father’s creditors. It must have been a dreadful experience for the boy to work ten-hour days all of a sudden and to have to endure the harsh working conditions common in factories at the time in addition to living separated from his family. After a couple of months the father could pay his debt thanks to a legacy from his late paternal grand-mother and the family was released from the debtors’ prison, but Charles Dickens’s mother insisted that he continued to work in the factory. In the end it was his father who removed the boy from the factory and sent him to school again for a while. Those few months, however, had a lasting impact on Charles Dickens’s soul and made him an ardent social critic as confirms his later fiction. 

In 1827 Charles Dickens left school and began working as a junior clerk at a law office at Gray's Inn. As soon as he had taught himself shorthand, he first entered upon a writing career. He became a freelance reporter covering legal proceedings for different journals, but he was also attracted to the stage. However, after having missed an acting audition at Covent Garden, he fully devoted himself to writing. As from 1833 he worked as a parliamentary journalist for The Morning Chronicle and his first short story A Dinner at Poplar Park appeared in the Londoner Monthly Magazine. Over the following three years Charles Dickens published several sketches under the pseudonym Boz. which were very popular and compiled to a collection titled Sketches by Boz. in 1836. The same year the writer married his editor’s daughter Catherine Hogarth. 

The commercial success of Sketches by Boz. prepared the grounds for an even bigger one: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, which came out in monthly instalments in 1836/37. From then on the rise of Charles Dickens as a novelist was unstoppable. While he continued as a journalist and editor of weekly as well as monthly periodicals (some of which he founded) all his life, he produced one highly successful novel after the other and most of them are widely read up to this day: The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-39), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838/39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840/41), Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty' (1841), The Christmas Books (for titles and publishing years see above), The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849/50), Bleak House (1852/53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860/61), Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), and the unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). 

It’s obvious that much of Charles Dickens work was strongly influenced by the writer’s own childhood experiences in the factory. Especially David Copperfield, Bleak House and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain are generally regarded as largely autobiographical although the novelist always took great care not to reveal the sources of his vivid and often shockingly realistic descriptions. In his writings the author based many characters on real people like for instance the family friend Elizabeth Roylance making an appearance as Mrs. Pipchin in Dombey and Son or Archibald Russell and his wife who have been immortalized as the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop. He also took recourse to places he knew well. So the scene of all Dickens novels is London where he spent almost all his life with the exception of travels to the USA and Canada and a short period in Italy, Switzerland and France. 

The literary production of Charles Dickens remained prolific throughout his life. In addition he started giving public readings of his works in 1853 and in the late 1950s he founded a theatrical company to bring the play The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins on the stage. For ten years he managed the Urania Cottage, a new kind of home for “fallen” women providing education in domestic household chores instead of punishment. Also the writer’s private life was turbulent. In 1857 the 45-year-old Charles Dickens fell up to the ears in love with the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. After the birth of his tenth child the following year he separated from his wife Catherine and humiliated her in public. It goes without saying that such industry asked its toll. In 1869 he suffered a first light stroke which was followed by a fatal one a couple of months later. Charles Dickens died at Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent, England/U.K., on 9 June 1870. 

For further reading I recommend the following (of countless) biographies:

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
painted by Karl von Blaas
(1873)

It’s no secret. When I choose something to read and review here on Edith’s Miscellany, the odds are almost 100% that it’ll be a book first published between 1900 and the present. Every once in a while I also go for a classic from the nineteenth century or before, but such reads attracted me a lot more when I was a teenager. Despite all I’m fully aware of the period having brought forth many important writers, notably women, whose work is appreciated up to this day. Everybody knows George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, but other nineteenth-century writers are rarely heard of. One of the most outstanding German-language authors between 1850 and the fin-de-siècle was the Austro-Hungarian noblewoman Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. 

The career of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as a writer was quite extraordinary considering that she belonged to the Catholic-Bohemian aristocracy of Austria-Hungary and that in her time writing wasn’t considered a suitable occupation for a woman, even less for one of her rank. Marie Baroness von Ebner-Eschenbach, née Baroness Dubský von Třebomyslice, was born in Zdislavice Castle near Kroměříž in Moravia, Austrian Empire (Austria-Hungary as from 1867; Czech Republic today), on 13 September 1830. As a matter of fact, she was an almost exact contemporary of the Austrian Emperor and Hungarian King Francis Joseph I who had come into the world less than a month earlier. Marie’s mother died from puerperal fever like so many at the time and her father remarried soon, but the girl became very close to both her stepmothers Eugénie Bartenstein (who died when she was seven years old) and Countess Xaverine Kolowrat-Krakowsky. 

The little baroness grew up in Zdislavice Castle where she passed the summers and in the family’s winter residence in Vienna. German and French governesses were charged with her education which was carefully supervised by Marie’s maternal grandmother, her aunt Helen and her stepmothers. As was often the case in noble families, the girl’s first language was French, but she also learned German and Czech, the latter certainly to a great part owing to Czech servants. When they stayed in Vienna, her second stepmother often took the girl to the Burgtheater and encouraged her to read, while she didn’t approve of her literary attempts. Marie was seventeen when her stepmother sent some poems to the famous Austrian poet and dramatist Franz Grillparzer in the hope that he would call them awful, but he didn’t. On the contrary, he praised them and thus transformed the girl’s wish to be a writer into determination. 

At the age of eighteen Marie Baroness Dubský von Třebomyslice married her cousin Moritz Baron von Ebner-Eschenbach who was fifteen years her senior and moved with him to Louka near Znojmo in Southern Moravia (today Czech Republic) where he taught at the Military Engineering Academy until his transferral to Vienna eight years later in 1856. Encouraged by Franz Grillparzer and with the full support of her husband Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach pursued her literary ambitions. In 1858 she dared a first step into the public: her epistolary satire Aus Franzensbad was published anonymously. After that she focused on dramas in the style of Friedrich Schiller for about twenty years, but none of those (Maria Stuart in Schottland: 1858; Marie Roland: 1867; and several one-act plays) was successful. 

At last Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach turned to the genre in which proved to lie her true talent: narrative writing. Her short novel Božena came out in the journal Deutsche Rundschau in 1876 and received some positive attention which encouraged her to continue on her new way. In 1879 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach did an apprenticeship as a clock maker – probably because she collected clocks – and wrote the narrative Lotti die Uhrmacherin (engl. Lotti the clock maker) printed in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1880. From then on publishing houses stood open to her and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach became one of the most widely-read and important authors of her time, noted above all for her elegant style and realistic depiction of characters and scenery. 

After a collection of Aphorismen (1880, translated as Aphorisms) and two series of very popular short stories (Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten: 1883 – including her most famous novella Krambambuli; Neue Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten: 1886) the writer brought out her most important novel Das Gemeindekind in 1887. Over the following twelve years Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach produced a large number of short stories and novellas like Two Contesses (Zwei Comtessen: 1885) and Beyond Atonement (Unsühnbar: 1890) in addition to the novel Agave (1903) and autobiographical sketches titled Meine Kinderjahre (1906). Altweibersommer from 1909 was the last work published during her lifetime.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s husband died in 1898, the same year when she received the highest civilian decoration of Austria-Hungary, the Cross of Honour for Arts and Literature. Two years later the University of Vienna honoured the writer for her life’s work conferring upon her as the first woman ever the degree of doctor of philosophy, honoris causa.

Marie Baroness von Ebner-Eschenbach died in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, on 12 March 1916 just a couple of months before Emperor Francis Joseph I.

If you wish to learn more about life and work of Marie Baroness von Ebner-Eschenbach I recommend the following biographies:

Author's Portrait: Ingeborg Bachmann

Always in the beginning of July, the town of Klagenfurt, Austria, changes for a couple of days from the quiet capital of the federal province of Carinthia into a buzzing hub of modern literature: it’s the venue of the Festival of German-language Literature. Its highlight is the award of one of the most prestigious literature prizes in the German-speaking world named after the late Austrian poet, playwright and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. From 4 to 7 July 2013 the finalists for this year’s prize will read their texts in front of the jury, an interested audience and TV cameras. For me this is reason enough to portray the writer today.

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, in July 1926. Her father was a teacher of languages in a grammar school and later a headmaster. The entry of Hitler’s troops into Austria in March 1938, which was hailed in many places of my country, and everything that followed had great impact on her view of the world making her take a firm stand against war and violence for the rest of her life. In 1944 she went to university to study philosophy, psychology and German philology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. As a student she had a love affair with the poet Paul Celan. In 1950 she presented her doctoral thesis on Die kritische Aufnahme der Existenzialphilosophie Martin Heideggers (The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger). 

As from the early 1950s Ingeborg Bachmann earned a decent living as an editor and scriptwriter for the Allied radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot. She became a member of the literary circle called Gruppe 47 that loosely united German-language writers like Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll (Nobel Prize for literature 1972), Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Günter Grass (Nobel Prize for literature 1999). At a conference in 1952 she read her lyrical poetry which was her literary breakthrough. The following year she gave up her job and moved to Italy working as a freelance writer and travelling a lot, while partly living with the German composer Hans Werner Henze. During their relationship she produced libretti for Hinze’s Operas Der Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg: 1960) and Der junge Lord (The Young Lord: 1965) and several poems which he set to music. 

In 1958 Ingeborg Bachmann met the Swiss writer Max Frisch and plunged into a difficult relationship with him which influenced the work of both and lasted until 1962. The early 1960s saw her moving between Rome, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt (where she held the newly created chair of poetics at the university during the winter term 1959/60) and travelling to Egypt, the Sudan and the German Democratic Republic. She settled down permanently in Rome in 1963. During this time she also began reconsidering her choice of literary genre. She took to writing few poems and concentrating on prose instead. In spring 1973 she made a reading tour of Poland visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau among others. 

The literary work of Ingeborg Bachmann can be called feminist writing because of its woman-centred perspective, but this is a label which was developed only later on. Apart from her poems which have been translated into English and collected in a bilingual volume titled Darkness Spoken (2005), Ingeborg Bachmann’s most important works comprise the early radio plays A Deal in Dreams (Ein Geschäft mit Träumen: 1953), The Cicadas (Zikaden: 1955) and The Good God of Manhattan (Der gute Gott von Manhattan: 1958) published in English as Three Radio Plays (1999), her partly autobiographical cycle of stories titled The Thirtieth Year (Das dreißigste Jahr: 1961), the novel Malina (1971), and the volume of stories Three Paths to the Lake (Simultan: 1972). 

Ingeborg Bachmann died from severe burns in a hospital in Rome, Italy, in October 1973, three weeks after her apartment had gone up in flames. Until today it remains uncertain whether the fire was an accident caused by her having fallen asleep with a burning cigarette or if it was suicide. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a biography in English, but there's at least Uwe Johnson's Trip to Klagenfurt: In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann.