Ossip Schubin

Born Aloisia Kirschner in Prague in 1854, she wrote in German and became widely known under the pseudonym Ossip Schubin. Reliable biographical sources identify her as an Austrian novelist from Bohemia, and note that the pen name came from a character in Ivan Turgenev.

Her work was especially associated with novels of salon and social life, and she was a successful and prolific writer in her day. Modern reference sources still remember her as an important late-19th-century popular novelist, even if she is less widely read now than she once was.

She died in 1934 at Košátky Castle in what was then Czechoslovakia. For audiobook listeners, she offers a glimpse into the moods, manners, and tensions of Central European literary life around the turn of the century.