Marie Ebner-Eschenbach
Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie, Freifrau von (Zdislavic, Moravia, 1830-1916, Vienna), née Countess Dubsky, was married to the officer, engineer, and professor Moritz von Ebner-Eschenbach in 1848. They lived at first in Moravia, then in Vienna. Her life was outwardly uneventful following the social round of her class, the winter in Vienna, the summer in the country. Early in her married life she conceived a passion for the theatre and the ambition to become a great dramatist. Her first play, Maria Stuart in Schottland (1860), was performed without success in Karlsruhe and severely criticized by O. Ludwig. Other dramatic works, including Marie Roland (1860), followed and failed, though Doktor Ritter (1869, a play about the young Schiller) and Die Veilchen (1878, a one-act play) were performed in the Burgtheater and Das Waldfräulein (1873) was produced by H. Laube in the Vienna Stadttheater. In 1890 and 1897 the Freie Bühne paid tribute to her endeavours for the theatre by performing her two one-acters, Ohne Liebe and Am Ende, both witty parodies on the Austrian aristocracy and both concerned with marriage, the former with the so-called Vernunftehe, the latter with an estranged husband who after a life of dissipation ultimately returns to his wise and compassionate wife.
In the 1870s Baroness von Ebner-Eschenbach began to write fiction, and soon achieved the public recognition which was denied her in the theatre. A collection of stories (Erzählungen, 1875) was followed by the novel Božena (1876) and by Neue Erzählungen (1881), which included Die Freiherren von Gemperlein. Her first outstanding volume was Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten (1883), which by its title suggests her characteristic broad social vision directed upon both the aristocracy to which she belonged and the peasantry which she sympathetically observed. Zwei Komtessen followed in 1885, Neue Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten in 1886, and the four stories of Miterlebtes in 1889, whilst the novel Das Gemeindekind (2 vols.), her best-known work, appeared in 1887. Equally powerful are the story Lotti, die Uhrmacherin (1889), the aristocratic novel Unsühnbar (1890) and the religious novel Glaubenslos? (1893); among her later works the Drei Novellen (1892) and the story Rittmeister Brand (1896) particularly deserve mention. She continued to write into her eighties, producing a further novel (Agave, 1903) and several volumes of stories (Alte Schule, 1897; Aus Spätherbsttagen, 1901; Altweibersonne, 1909; Genrebilder, 1910; Stille Welt, 1915). In 1906 she published Meine Kinderjahre and in 1916 Meine Erinnerungen an Grillparzer. She was a novelist who combined acute realistic portrayal with reserved yet unflinching social criticism; at the same time she had compassion, which she extended to animals as well as to human beings. A special feature is her dry sense of humour which, reinforcing her critical stance, could turn into caustic irony.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's Sämtliche Werke (12 vols.) appeared in 1928,
