Bozena Nemcová

Bozena Nemcová was one of the most important Czech novelist of the 19th century and is known for her novel The Grandmother.

She partipated in an outstanding way in the Czech National Renaissance, a movement that wanted to recover the culture of the country in the midst of a growing Germanization.

“We women are very far from everything that feeds the soul” said Bozena Nemcová in a letter addressed to one of her friends. It’s probably that the Destiny of women which was the motive that inspired her first literary work, a poem entitled To Czech Women.

BIOGRAPHY

Bozena Nemcová was born in Viena. Her father was Joham Pankel from Lower Austria and her mother, Teresie Novoná, was a maid of Bohemian origin. Some authors question her origin because according to one hypothesis, Bozena could be an illegitimate daughter of a noble family.

In her childhood she lived near the small town of Ratiborice, where her grandmother Magdalena Novotná played an important part in her life.

When she was 17 years old, she married Josef Nemec, who was fifteen years older than her. The marriage became unhappy. Nemec, her husband, was said to be a rude and authoritarian man. He was a Bohemian patriot, who did not sit well with his superiors and he was often transferred to different locations and later was dismissed from his post, which caused the marriage to be stripped and Nemcová had to live with her four children and suffered from a lack of money.

In Prague, Nemcová entered the patriotic circles that motivated her to write. She began to collect materials for her first book of fairy tales that was edited between 1845 and 1847. She became an activist of Czech and she suffered political reprisals. In spite of all the difficulties, Bozena did not stop writing.

In July of 1854 she finished the top book of her literary work, The Grandmother, which had 350 Czech editions. It has been published and translated into twenty languages, including Spanish.

In 1858, another novel was published, The Village under Mountains. The writer visited Slovakia on several occasions, a country that became another source of inspiration for her. She included many of the Slovak folk legends in her storybooks.

Bozena died in poverty in January 1862 as a victim of cancer when she was 42 years old. The Bohemian patriots arranged a magnificent funeral for her. The grave is in the Vysehrad cemetery. In 1955, on the Zofin Island in Prague, a statue in her memory was unveiled, and the International Union of Astronomy put her name to a crater of Venus and also to an asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Mª José Escanero.

English for Fun 4A