Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob Robinson, who wrote under the pen name Talvj, received early recognition as a prose writer, literary critic, and translator of novels and folk songs. She began writing poetry in her teens and had fiction and literary criticism published when she was in her twenties. Her early fame rests on her excellent verse translation of Serbian folk songs (1825-1826), a project she undertook at Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's suggestion. He rightly assumed that since she wrote poetry and knew Latin, English, and Russian, she could easily teach herself Serbian and translate these recently collected songs, which were then exciting the imagination of German literary figures. Her most important achievement as a literary critic is her solution to the controversy over the authenticity of songs attributed to the ancient Scottish bard Ossian: with her experience in folk song, she was able to prove that they...