Lou Andreas-Salomé

Born in St. Petersburg in 1861, Lou Andreas-Salomé became a Russian-born writer, essayist, and later psychoanalyst whose work and life drew attention across Europe. She is often remembered for her close connections with major figures including Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud, but she was also an accomplished author in her own right.

She wrote fiction, essays, memoir, and studies of religion, psychology, and art, and she spent much of her life engaged with the big ideas of her era. After marrying the linguist Friedrich Carl Andreas, she lived for many years in Göttingen and eventually became involved in psychoanalysis, joining the circle around Freud.

Andreas-Salomé died in 1937, just before her 76th birthday. Today she is read both for her own books and for the unusually rich window her life offers into the cultural world of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.