About Margarete Böhme
Margarete Böhme (8 May 1867 – 23 May 1939) was, arguably, one of the most widely read German writers of the early 20th century. Böhme authored 40 novels – as well as short stories, autobiographical sketches, and articles. The Diary of a Lost Girl, first published in 1905 as Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, is her best known and bestselling book. By the end of the 1920s, it had sold more than a million copies, ranking it among the bestselling books of its time. One contemporary scholar has called it “Perhaps the most notorious and certainly the commercially most successful autobiographical narrative of the early twentieth century.” == Early life and work == Böhme was born Wilhelmina Margarete Susanna Feddersen in 1867. The future writer grew up in Husum, a small town in Northern Germany. Husum was dubbed “the grey town by the grey sea” by its best known resident, the novelist and poet Theodor Storm. Her mother's aunt was Lena Wies, a storyteller and longtime friend of Storm who furnished the novelist with legends and tales for his later work. Böhme began writing early. At age 17, she published her first story, “The Secret of the Rose Passage,” in a Hamburg newspaper.
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