What’s new
Everything added to this site, newest first — and, where a translation turned something up, what it was. The home page carries the last few; this is the whole record.
Follow by feed— new chapters and pages land here first, a few times a week.
2026
Gallery, Paper Trail and memoir notes checked against their sources
The page for “From My Hothouse” linked the wrong page of the 1891 art weekly that engraved it: the link opened a picture by another painter. It now opens her plate. “At the Gate of the Future” said her memoir describes the painting; the description, and its showing at a Berlin gallery in January 1894, come from Boetticher's catalogue of painters' works (1898), which the page now quotes.
“Mors Imperator” now gives the sources for its size: 2.5 by 1.3 metres in the reports from the 2026 exhibition, much less than the 3.50 by 1.50 of an 1898 catalogue or the guesses of 1887. “Traumgott” is now dated by 1894, when it hung at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, and the two Bain photographs of her American tour are dated 1910. The Riviera panels “Ma serre, Nice” and “Yucca and Cacti” now say what is documented about the cycle's 1890 Berlin showing, and leave “with success” to the auction house that used the phrase.
On the Paper Trail, the Viennese art weekly that reported the 1887 affair is now named as its masthead names it, the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik. The 1910 interview's headline is printed as the papers printed it, “Megalomonia”, with a note on the misprint. In the memoir, the London gallery of her 1908 show is now identified as the Newman Art Gallery, the dance teacher of the 1911 moon festival has a first name, the rose festival a date and its charitable purpose, and the pictures stolen in 1912 her own count beside the police's.
An About page, and the memoir's poems checked against her books
The site has an About page, in the menu after The Paper Trail: how the site began, with a painting seen as a phone wallpaper, and how it was built, from the first translations to the period encyclopedias now used to check the notes. Every page's footer now also gives an address for corrections and questions.
Chapter 10 of the memoir mentions her first book of poems, Regina vitae! (“Queen of Life!”), and its note used to say that no copy had been found. Two library copies are digitised, and the note now describes the book from them and links the one that still has her portrait. It no longer says the book presents the bitter quatrain she quotes next as a poem to her husband Oswald: the quatrain is there, but untitled and addressed to no one, and the poem the book heads “To Oswald” is a love poem.
She quoted her poems from memory, and three of them now have notes giving the printed text. The quatrain's “demon of nothing” is an “evil spirit” in the book and in the two newspapers that quoted it in 1887. “Solitude” is not in Regina vitae! but closes Via passionis (“The Way of the Passion”, 1895), and the four lines that end the memoir are the first stanza of her “And Fame and Love”. The page on Via passionis also no longer says the book is set in Fraktur, the German blackletter: its poems are printed in italic roman type.
One journey to India, one house in Schmargendorf, and a word restored
The memoir's notes now agree with one another on the years 1900 to 1908. Her own numbering tells against a second journey to India: she calls it her first world journey, and the one of 1908 her second. So the notes, the biography and the page on the peacock portrait now all give the winter of 1905–06. The second journey began in mid-September 1908 by her account, but she sailed from Rotterdam in late October and landed in Sumatra in November.
The Villa Waldfrieden she rented in Schmargendorf was not a namesake of the house where Lou Andreas-Salomé lived and Rilke lodged: a Berlin address book of 1902 lists her at the same address, Hundekehlestraße 11. The Vienna exhibition of chapter 23 now has its dates, March to May 1903, and the seven volumes of verse she claims can all be named. A dozen notes, and the page on “Elaine”, took 1926 for the year she was writing. It is only the year the memoir appeared, after her death; she wrote it in her last years.
One word in her open letter of 1887 on “Mors Imperator” is corrected. The German text read “Verbot”, the jury's “ban”, where the Graz newspaper it was taken from reads “Verdict”, as do the two Berlin papers that printed it on 5 August. The English now says “verdict” too. And the page on “The Life-Sphinx” now gives the publisher of her 1901 book of that name as G. Müller-Mann of Leipzig, as the firm's own title pages print it, not “C.”, a newspaper's misprint.
The memoir's dates, checked against the papers of her lifetime
She wrote the memoir late, from memory, and arranged it by place and theme rather than by date. Its notes now correct those dates wherever the German newspapers of her own time disagree, naming the paper and the day. She married Oswald Schmidt in August 1882, not 1889, and the divorce was reported in July 1890. The wedding to Konrad Telmann was in June 1891, not 1892. She moved from Rome to Berlin in August 1898, and her first journey to India was most probably the winter of 1905–06, a year earlier than she tells it.
The same papers settle smaller things. The Berlin showing of “Mors Imperator” in 1887 took almost 2,500 marks, far below her own figure, and her one-woman shows ran over six years, 1899 to 1905, not three. The gallery pages now date first showings from the press, and “historical still life” was already a critic's name for her manner in 1881. The note on Rilke's letter no longer says he turned her figure of Asrael into a man: she had painted a male angel of death herself. Her “Evoè, Bacche!”, long placed at Turin in 1884, hung in Rome in 1883, where the catalogue lists it.
The 1896 lecture “On the Artistic Education of Woman” is revised as well. It follows the printed paragraphs, keeps closer to her voice, and its notes now identify “The New Governess” as Antonie Volkmar's picture and trace the closing verse to Alfred Meißner's poem to George Sand.
Three lost paintings, and the painter at work
Three paintings join the gallery. “From My Hothouse” is a tall narrow hothouse piece shown at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1891 and engraved for an art weekly that spring. “The Life-Sphinx” — a winged figure collapsed on a rock above the surf, which a Berlin magazine called Böcklinesque — was reproduced in 1899, and gave its name to a book of her novellas two years later. “At the Gate of the Future” is a cemetery gate standing half open, described in a catalogue of her work long before anyone here had seen it. All three canvases are untraced, and these plates are the only images of them.
The fourth is a photograph, and it is the first here to show her at work: seated at the easel in 1899, brush out, palette resting on the chair, a copy of the magazine it appeared in propped against the easel foot. The other portraits on the site show her posed.
The translations have English addresses now. Each one sat at the German title of its original — /translations/studium-der-frau/ — on a site for readers who cannot read German. The 1896 lecture is at /translations/on-the-artistic-education-of-woman/ and the memoir at /translations/the-novel-of-my-life/, which is now its title on the site as well, in place of the German; every old link redirects, chapters included. One caption is corrected: the art weekly she wrote for in 1893 is no longer called Viennese, since its title page that year reads Munich. Printing is fixed too: it used to lose every hover-note and, in dark mode, print black pages.
All seventy-five chapters
Chapters 65 to 75 are on the site, and with them the book is complete: seventy-five chapters, a hundred thousand words of English. They carry her from Timgad and Biskra through Algiers, Majorca and Barcelona to a garden party outside Berlin in July 1914 that ends very badly, and then into the two years after it, when the money was gone and her daughters came home.
Several of them change what this site can say about her books. Yoshiwara, until now dated only by its 1920 title page, turns out to have been written in five weeks in a Saharan hotel room and set in type in 1914 — it was stopped on the point of publication by the war with Japan. Its page has been rewritten to say so. Three further novels are named in these chapters, and none of the three has been found in print.
The contents page no longer counts up towards seventy-five. The notes follow the same rule as before: where she is wrong about a date, a saint or a century, the note says so instead of tidying it away. The book closes on four lines of verse, and the note under them says plainly that they have not yet been checked against her printed collections. The Mors Imperator page in the gallery now gathers the 1887 affair in one place: her open letter, the Viennese report and the satire that answered it, two later notices, and the chapter where she tells it herself.
A winter in the Tunisian south
Chapter 64 of the memoir. Weeks at Tozeur during the date harvest, where she falls in with an Italian painter living in the district governor’s old Arab house — he teaches her to smoke hashish, and stays in the book for eight more chapters. Then Kairouan, a day’s painting in the ruins of Dougga with stiff hands from the cold, and the Roman summer palaces at Bulla Regia, built underground against the heat and being dug out while she watched.
It closes on an unsolved murder at the site, and on her own escape from something like it two chapters earlier — a piece of construction in a book otherwise arranged by place rather than story. One line dates the journey from outside the memoir for the first time: she rides the new railway to Tozeur, and the line reached Tozeur in 1913. Where she is wrong the notes say so rather than correcting her quietly.
The memoir’s punctuation has also been checked against the edition throughout. Forty-four of the earlier chapters already matched mark for mark; what was missing was a row of nine spaced dashes in chapter 11, the only printer’s rule in the book, and four quotations set inside other quotations. There is also a feed now, if you would rather be told than come back.
The memoir’s German, checked against the edition it came from
The German column of the memoir has been compared, word for word, against a clean text of the 2025 edition it was taken from. Two kinds of damage came out of it. The first is invisible from the English side: accented letters that disappeared in extraction with nothing left to mark the loss, so that Mercié read as Mercie, Noël as Noel, Genève as Geneve, Lourenço as Lourenco. Around forty of these are now restored.
The second runs the other way, and matters more. Marks had been added that the print does not have — Caffè for her Caffe, Stillleben for her Stilleben, unmöglich for her umöglich. Correcting an author’s spelling into modern German is a way of quietly editing her, and the policy here is the opposite: where she is irregular the page keeps the irregularity. All three are reverted.
Four places where the English or a note had drifted from the German above it are also fixed. One was a correction that had gone the wrong way: Eumäos, the Pomeranian swineherd of the Odyssey, was right all along and had been “corrected” into an artifact of the reference text. It is right again.
Three memoir chapters, and the first of her poems in the art press
Chapters 61 to 63. The first is a page of accounts: a year after the Tempio reopened the visitors have thinned, and she has two thousand catalogues reprinted with “After the Robbery” stamped on them. Then seven months in Tunisia and Algeria — Tunis and the souks, Carthage with the man who excavated it as her guide, the amphitheatre at El Djem by moonlight, a bad night at Sfax, the oases at Gabès and Gafsa. In Tunis she was received by the wife of the Bey, almost certainly Lella Kmar, consort to three beys in succession.
The journey can now be dated. Her housekeeper’s leaving date, given a year in advance two chapters earlier, puts the departure in autumn 1913 and the return around May 1914 — the last of her great journeys, and she had no idea of it. Two poems go up as well, printed by the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik in June 1892. Via passionis gives them quieter three years later: a whole stanza cut, every em-dash softened, and Wahnsinnsglück gone. It survives only here.
The home page has been cut back. It had been listing the same English texts three times over — a status panel, a “Start reading” grid repeating it, and again among her books. Start reading is gone, and each book now carries its own state of translation.
Sources becomes The Paper Trail, and her own writing moves in with the books
The section collecting what other people printed about her in her lifetime is now called The Paper Trail, at /paper-trail/. Works and Translations were two lists of the same books, so they are now one: every book is on /works/, with its state of translation on the entry, and the reading pages keep their addresses. Old links to all of it still work.
What goes where is now decided by who wrote it. Anything she wrote is under Works — the books, the 1896 lecture, and her 1887 open letter to the Berlin jury, which had been filed with the press coverage of the scandal it answered. The two 1887 pieces about her stayed on The Paper Trail and now link across to her reply, and it links back, so the quarrel reads as one exchange. New there too: “Spanische Künstler in Rom”, three pages of signed art criticism from the Roman studios, printed in Vienna in January 1892, translated in full with the German alongside.
Two more memoir chapters. Chapter 59 stops travelling for the first time in seventeen chapters and counts what the robbery cost; chapter 60 is the eight-day visit to her adopted-away daughters, announced at the door as their aunt, which by then was the legal truth. And the biography has a new portrait — the oval halftone that ran with her work in the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik in December 1893, in place of the studio photograph.
From the giant chapter to the end of the fifth world journey
Chapters 42 to 58, the travelling half of Part Three. The giant chapter 42 holds three journeys at once; then the picture hall opens on 2 June 1911, Africa runs from Cape Town to Kilimanjaro and on by hammock caravan across the lion plains of Tsavo, and at Colombo a letter tells her that her house in Berlin has been stripped, flooded and abandoned. She sails east anyway: two months at Angkor, Annam, the Pacific, Hawaii, the Rockies, Quebec, Boston.
Three finds. The journey can now be dated from five independent directions, the last of them a language congress at Quebec in June 1912 — so the only year she states outright, 1913, is wrong. The résident supérieur she mentions in passing is Georges Mahé, who would open an emperor’s tomb within the year. And “Cither, der ewig Junge,” in the last lines of the journey, is Rückert’s Chidher — the deathless wanderer who returns every five hundred years to find the world replaced.
Part Three opens: nine chapters
Chapters 33 to 41 open Part Three: the first world journey of 1906–07 — India, Burma, Ceylon, Jerusalem — the Indian Preuschen Exhibition it produced, Norway and ten days with Björnson at Aulestad, Petersburg, the purchase of the Tempio Hermione in 1908, a London season, and the decision to build the sphinx-flanked picture hall.
Two finds, and a date. The exhibition’s star piece, Santa Vita — a Leda with a black swan, meant as the answer to her Circe — appears in no bibliography. The London show appears in no other source either, and was saved when Edward VII had her pictures brought to Buckingham Palace. And a lament for Bergen’s burnt Hanseatic quarter dates the writing of the Norway chapter to 1916.
The paper trail now carries its sources
Every page in The Paper Trail rebuilt on the original text, using the same reading apparatus as the translations: numbered notes inline, the notes collected at the foot, and the original beside our English where the source is not in English. All four originals have been tracked down, cited in full and linked to a scan.
Two sources added. Rilke’s 1896 review is here complete for the first time — eight hundred words of German, where this site had sixty at second hand — and it holds the fullest description anyone has of her lost Asrael. And the oldest record of her we have: Angelo de Gubernatis’s 1889 dictionary of living Italian artists, which names a painting, Evoè, Bacche!, that Rilke singles out twelve years later. Checking the 1910 American interview against the original also fixed a misprint that had inverted its joke: Germany is too old to see what America sees, not too odd.
Ten chapters — Vienna, Heinrich Mann, the adoption, and Niobid arms
Chapters 23 to 32, which complete Part Two: Vienna, where a poster campaign turns the press against her and an autumn recital is howled down; two more one-woman shows, in Munich and Stockholm; Tyrol and Corfu; the adoption of her daughters in 1906; and the confessional chapter that closes the part.
Three finds. Three exhibitions that no account of her records. The writer she calls only “H. M.,” whom the chapter’s own details identify as Heinrich Mann. And the adoption itself, which arrives in a subordinate clause about a school in Kiel.
Five more chapters — vampires, Paris, and Lou Andreas-Salomé
Chapters 18 to 22. Longing is painted as a vampire-woman with bat's wings, and the picture becomes the chief success of her Paris one-woman show of November 1900 — seventeen pictures sold, the Figaro's critic writing about her seven times in a fortnight. In half a parenthetical sentence, a name nobody has attached to her: Lou Andreas-Salomé, “my Schmargendorf friend” — whose own Schmargendorf villa, where Rilke lodged, carried the same name as Preuschen's. A music critic prices his piano playing at ten thousand marks in blackmail; and she nearly buys a monastery at Ragusa, but not at the price of housing its plague patients.
Seven more chapters — the Telmann marriage, and what came after
Chapters 11 to 17. Her second husband dies on the page in a scene she sets down as a playscript; four one-woman exhibitions turn up that nobody has recorded; the Empress orders a fire-screen and the Kaiser sends word that he prefers the earlier work; and two men who swindle her reappear years later as characters in her fiction.
Five chapters, and a way to read them
Chapters 6 to 10, ending on the Mors Imperator scandal and her own account of painting the dead woman from a photograph of herself laid out as a corpse. Long works now read chapter by chapter, with the notes at the foot of each, and a new status tier says when a text is actively being worked through.
Six more images, and the Yoshiwara page designs
The gallery grew from eight entries to fourteen, with photographers now credited where a licence asks for it. The decorated pages of the 1920 Yoshiwara — title page, contents and the three part-titles — went to that book's own page, alongside a scan of the printing.
The first English translations go online
Her 1896 lecture on the artistic education of women, the three 1887 press pieces from the Mors Imperator scandal including her own protest letter, and the memoir begun. Every translation can also be read side by side with the German.