Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874)

Sophie, Comtesse de Ségur, was born Sofiya Feodorovna Rostopchina in Saint Petersburg, Russia to an ancient noble family. Her father Count Fyodor Rostopchin was lieutenant-general and later Minister of Foreign Affairs for Tsar Paul I. Her mother Catherine Protassova had been a maid of honor to Empress Catherine the Great. Sophie received a typical education for children of the Russian aristocracy and became fluent in five languages. In 1814, the family left Russia, going first to Warsaw, then to the German Confederation, the Italian peninsula, and finally settled in Paris, France in 1817. Sophie's father established a salon, and his wife and daughter converted to Roman Catholicism from Russian Orthodoxy.

In 1819, Sophie was married to Eugène, Comte de Ségur. The marriage was largely unhappy although the couple had eight children together. The Comtesse began to devote herself to literature, writing down fairy tales she told her grandchildren into a collection called Les Nouveaux Contes de fées, published in 1855. She wrote her first novel at age 58, Les malheurs de Sophie (Sophie's Misfortunes), published in 1859 and still popular among French children. It became the first in the "Fleurville trilogy" that also included Les petite filles models (The Good Little Girls) and Les vacances (The Holidays). She subsequently published another 15 educational or moralizing novels until 1872. They were collected in 1990 under the title Œuvres de la comtesse de Ségur.