German poet and painter, translator and author on women’s literature, who used the pseudonym Julia Virginia.
She first studied painting and sculpture with Karl Ludwig Sand in Kassel and Munich and Professor Gustav Eberlein in Berlin. She became a sought-after portraitist whose works could be seen in the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1900. She made busts and reliefs of the author Ludwig Fulda, the poet composer Victor von Woikowsky-Biedau, the Frankfurt Senate President Diehl and the author Hermann Sudermann. She married a French banker and lived for several years under the name Virginia Fould in Paris. After his death, she returned to her hometown of Frankfurt.
By 1898 she was one of the authors of the publisher Schuster & Löffler in Berlin. Under the name Julia Virginia she published a series of volumes of her poems. She translated poems and the novel The artist by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko into German as well as diary notes and the correspondence between the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She edited the poems of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and published a well-respected anthology of contemporary German women’s poetry.
She was a member of the Berlin Women’s Club of 1900. In 1922, she married Richard Laengsdorff, a childhood friend, and then called herself Julia Virginia Laengsdorff. After 1938, traces of her life are lost. The Marbach Literature Archive and the Hamburg State Archives hold some of her letters and manuscripts. Shortly before her death on 23 April 1942 she bequeathed to the Schopenhauer Museum a letter from the philosopher.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)