As she looked back upon her life, Isolde Kurz commented: "Ebenso geht auch mein eigenes Schaffen nicht linear, sondern im Kreise vor sich, als läge die ganze Arbeit wartend in einer unsichtbaren Tiefe und brauchte nur gehoben zu werden" (Even thus [as in her life], my own creations did not progress in linear fashion, but should perhaps be compared to a circle enclosing invisible depths where the work lay waiting to be brought to the surface). She regarded her life, as well as her fiction, as an opus requiring interpretation, as the story of an individual's fate in which universal principles of cultural and personal psychology could be discerned. To her, events were important only insofar as they suggested eternal themes. The cultural themes and forces that shaped her life appear in poetic form in her literary work.

Born in Stuttgart in 1853, but raised in the...