Luise Mühlbach

Luise Mühlbach was the pen name of Clara Mundt, a German novelist who produced historical fiction on an industrial scale and was translated into English almost as fast as she wrote. Her subject is the court: Frederick the Great, Joseph II, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon's marshals, seen through the household rather than the battlefield. She read widely in memoirs and letters, and the domestic detail is far more reliable than the reputation of the genre suggests. She ran a literary salon in Berlin and argued in print for a woman's right to leave a marriage, which had one of her early novels banned in Austria.