Klementyna Hoffmanowa

Klementyna Hoffmanowa, born Klementyna Tańska (23 November 1798 – 21 September 1845) was a Polish novelist, playwright, editor, translator, teacher and activist. She was the first woman in Poland to support herself from writing and teaching, as well as one of Poland's first writers of children's literature. She made her debut in 1819 with a moralizing treatise A Souvenir After a Good Mother. In the 1820s, she edited a popular magazine for children and published several children books, that have won a wide audience over several generations. She also published a number of novels, including: The Letters of Elżbieta Rzeczycka to her friend Urszula (1824) and, arguably her best known work, The Diary of Countess Françoise Krasinska (1825), translated into several languages, and recounted as one of the first Polish psychological novels. Hoffmanowa raised the postulate of economic self-empowerment of women. She believed that the first step for women to achieve independence should be gaining education to enable paid work. However, she held conservative views on the role of women and referred to national and Catholic values. In 1826, her candidacy for membership in the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning was submitted, but she was not accepted as a woman. She remained unmarried until the age of thirty, long by the standards of her time for a woman, and only in 1829 she married Karol Boromeusz Hoffman. Until then she used her maiden name. Though writing was her main and most preferred activity and she considered herself primarily a writer, she also worked as a teacher (as an inspector or a visitator) of female schools, and lecturer in moral science at the Governess' Institute in Warsaw (1826–1831). She educated a number of young women, some of whom later became writers and teachers themselves. Hoffmanowa was recalled with respect and...