Life
Le Fort was born in the city of Minden, in the former Province of Westphalia, then the Kingdom of Prussia within the German Empire. She was the daughter of a colonel in the Prussian Army, who was of Swiss Huguenot descent. She was educated as a young girl in Hildesheim, and went on to study at universities at Heidelberg, Marburg and Berlin. She made her home in Bavaria in 1918, living in Baierbrunn until 1939.
Despite publishing some minor works previously, Le Fort's writing career really began with the publication in 1925 of the posthumous work Glaubenslehre by her mentor, Ernst Troeltsch, a major scholar in the field of the philosophy of religion, which she had edited. She converted to Roman Catholicism the following year. Most of her writings came after this conversion, and they were marked by the issue of the struggle between faith and conscience.
In 1931 Le Fort published the novella, Die Letzte am Schafott (English: The Last One at the Scaffold); an English translation, entitled Song at the Scaffold, appeared in 1933. This work was the inspiration for the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites written by Francis Poulenc, which premiered in 1957. The opera was based on a similarly entitled libretto by Georges Bernanos.
Le Fort went on to publish over 20 books, comprising poems, novels and short stories. Her work gained her the accolade of being "the greatest contemporary transcendent poet". Her works are appreciated for their depth and beauty of their ideas, and for her sophisticated refinement of style. She was nominated by Herman Hesse for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was granted an honorary Doctorate of Theology for her contributions to the issue of faith in her works.
In 1952, Le Fort won the Gottfried-Keller Prize, an esteemed Swiss literary award.
Among her many other works, Le Fort also published a book titled Die ewige Frau (The Eternal Woman) in 1934, which appeared in paperback in English in 2010. In this work, she countered the modernist analysis on the feminine, not with polemical argument, but with a meditation on womanhood.
In 1939 Le Fort had made her home in the town of Oberstdorf in the Bavarian Alps, and it was there that she died on 1 November 1971, aged 95.
Read more about this topic: Gertrud Von Le Fort
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