Maria Janitschek (1859–1927)

Maria Janitschek, née Tölk, was born in Mödling, near Vienna, Austria, to parents who were not married. Her father was a military officer. Maria was raised in poverty by her mother Anna Tölk and educated in a Hungarian convent school. At age 19, she moved with her mother to Graz, where she worked as a journalist for the first time and published newspaper articles under the pseudonym Marius Stein. In 1882, she married Hubert Janitschek, a professor of art history, and lived with him in Strasbourg and Leipzig. After her husband died in 1893, Maria moved to Berlin and later to Munich.

Her first published books were anthologies of poems and collections of short stories focused on the problems of love and marriage for women in a manner that was very liberal for the time. In 1889 she published her first volume of poems, Irdische und unirdische Träume (Earthly and Unearthly Dreams), which included the highly criticized poem "Ein modernes Weib" (A Modern Wife), about a disgraced woman who challenges a man to a duel and kills him. Her short story collection Die neue Eva (The New Eve) was banned in Germany in 1909. She took as her role models the writers Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and Leo Tolstoy. She was a prolific writer and continued to published until 1924.