author
Anna Magdalena Johannsen
A little-known author remembered for Everlasting Pearl, a 1913 book that tells the story of a Chinese woman with sympathy and close attention to daily life. Her work reflects an early English-language effort to bring one woman’s experience in China to a wider audience.
1 Audiobook
Everlasting Pearl: One of China's Women
by Anna Magdalena Johannsen
About the author
Very little confirmed biographical information about Anna Magdalena Johannsen is easy to find in reliable public sources. Open Library lists her as the author of Everlasting Pearl and related editions, and reader listings for the book identify it as a work published in the early 20th century.
She is chiefly associated with Everlasting Pearl: One of China’s Women, published in 1913. The book’s title and surviving catalog records suggest a strong interest in women’s lives in China, presented for English-speaking readers of the time.
Because so little well-sourced background is available, Johannsen remains a somewhat mysterious figure today. That scarcity of detail can make her work feel even more distinctive: she is known less through a public literary profile than through the single book that has outlasted her biography.