Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Born in Vienna on December 12, 1883, Hermynia Zur Mühlen was an Austrian writer and translator from an aristocratic Catholic family. Her life took her far from the world she was born into: she became a socialist, earned the nickname "the Red Countess," and was later described as one of the best-known women writers of the Weimar Republic.

She translated more than seventy books into German from English, Russian, and French, including works by Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, and Edna Ferber. Alongside her translation work, she wrote fairy tales with a radical edge, detective novels published under the name Lawrence H. Desberry, short prose, and memoir.

After an unhappy marriage ended, she spent much of her life with the translator Stefan Klein, who remained her partner for the rest of her life. She left Germany for Vienna in 1933 and later settled in Britain, where she died in Radlett, Hertfordshire, on March 20, 1951.