The Red Countess

Download or read book The Red Countess written by Hermynia Zur Mühlen and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition of this book: This translation is something of an event. For the first time, it makes Zur Mühlen’s text available to English-speaking readers in a reliable version. —David Midgley, University of Cambridge [This book] represents exceptional value, both as an enjoyable read and as an introduction to an attractive author who amply deserves rediscovery. —Ritchie Robertson, Journal of European Studies, 42(1): 106-07. Born into a distinguished aristocratic family of the old Habsburg Empire, Hermynia Zur Mühlen spent much of her childhood and early youth travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. Never comfortable with the traditional roles women were expected to play, she broke as a young adult both with her family and, after five years on his estate in the old Czarist Russia, with her German Junker husband, and set out as an independent, free-thinking individual, earning a precarious living as a writer. Zur Mühlen translated over 70 books from English, French and Russian into German, notably the novels of Upton Sinclair, which she turned into best-sellers in Germany; produced a series of detective novels under a pseudonym; wrote seven engaging and thought-provoking novels of her own, six of which were translated into English; contributed countless insightful short stories and articles to newspapers and magazines; and, having become a committed socialist, achieved international renown in the 1920s with her Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children, which were widely translated including into Chinese and Japanese. Because of her fervent and outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she and her life-long Jewish partner, Stefan Klein, had to flee first Germany, where they had settled, and then, in 1938, her native Austria. They found refuge in England, where Zur Mühlen died, forgotten and virtually penniless, in 1951.