Maria Konopnicka
1842–1910
Biography
Maria Konopnicka was a Polish poet, novelist and writer for children, working through the Positivist decades of the nineteenth century and into the early 1900s. She was born in Suwałki, in the Russian-ruled part of Poland, and as a young woman she married an older man. The marriage was unhappy. In the 1870s she separated from her husband and moved with her children to Warsaw to devote herself to writing. For much of the 1890s and the early 1900s she lived abroad, in Italy, Switzerland and other parts of Europe. She died in 1910 in Lwów, a city in Austrian Galicia that is now Lviv in Ukraine.
Her first recognition came in the 1870s with a poem that the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz praised. She went on to write lyric poems, some of them shaped like folk songs, and also short stories, reportage and memoirs. Her writing often turned to the oppression and poverty of peasants, workers and Polish Jews. From the 1880s she wrote for children in a plain, unpreachy style that broke new ground in Polish. She took part in campaigns for women's rights and in an international protest over the treatment of Polish schoolchildren at Września, in the Prussian partition.
The site holds O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi, one of her children's tales, whose title means roughly 'About the little gnomes and the orphan Marysia'. It is a good starting point for readers who know her name from Polish poetry but not from her work for children.
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Books
O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi
by Maria Konopnicka
Marysia, a poor orphan, is sent to mind a flock of ducks and meets the dwarfs who live under the earth, and they take her into their world. Konopnicka's classic tale for children carries her through a long, wandering adventure among dwarfs, animals and wicked folk. This book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.