author
Elsa von Bonin
1882–1965
A German writer and lawyer, she brought an unusually wide life experience to her fiction, moving between literary work and public life. Her career links the world of early 20th-century women professionals with a body of novels and prose remembered today in German literary reference works.
1 Audiobook
Das Leben der Renée von Catte : Roman
by Elsa von Bonin
About the author
Born in Berlin on October 14, 1882, she came from a Prussian noble family and was the youngest of three sisters. Reference sources identify her as a German writer, novelist, and jurist, and note that she later also became a landowner.
She wrote under the name Elsa von Bonin, and some sources also list the form Elsa von Bonin-Brettin. Although she is not a widely known name today, she appears in major German biographical catalogs and in women’s literary reference projects, which suggests a steady place in the literary culture of her time.
She died in Berlin on June 17, 1965. For listeners exploring older German literature, her work offers a glimpse of a writer whose life crossed law, property, and fiction rather than fitting into only one world.