Angela Langer

Born in Vienna in 1884 as Angela Prager, she grew up mostly in Langenlois in Lower Austria in a large, financially strained family. After elementary school she worked as a maid in Krems and Stein an der Donau, but she kept studying whenever she could, taking English lessons and developing her writing with support from the teacher and writer Josef Wichner.

Work took her to Budapest and later to London, where her literary ambitions gained new momentum. There she began writing in English, and her first novel, Rue and Roses—published in German as Stromaufwärts in 1913—drew on her own experiences in domestic service. The book stood out for its close, unsentimental view of the insecurity and pressure faced by working women.

Langer later lived in Brussels and Berlin and published a second novel, Der Klausenhof, in 1916. She died the same year, on June 25, 1916, in Neustift im Felde, still only in her early thirties. Though her life was brief, her work remains striking for the way it joins self-education, social reality, and literary ambition.