
Anna is a quiet, deeply reflective young woman whose German upbringing has left her both proud and painfully self‑analytical. Growing up amid her father's failing businesses and her mother's constant worries, she drifts from place to place, finding work as a governess where she endures the usual hardships of the profession. Poetry becomes her refuge, a place where her wistful heart can give voice to the melancholy and longing that color her inner world. Though she often feels isolated, her sincere honesty shines through her modest, almost shy demeanor.
Everything changes when a cultured stranger, a thirty‑year‑old smoker with a taste for literature and art, enters Anna’s life. His conversations awaken a new intensity in her writing, turning her verses from solitary musings into passionate love poems. Yet his enigmatic nature—describing himself as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”—leaves Anna questioning what role she might play in his mysterious plans, and a strange nocturnal vision in a graveyard hints at deeper uncertainties ahead.
Language
en
Duration
~4 hours (257K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Release date
2020-12-03
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1886–1916
Raised in poverty and sent into domestic service as a teenager, this Austrian writer turned hard experience into vivid fiction. Her short life produced powerful, partly autobiographical novels about work, class, and the determination to educate oneself.
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