Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937)

Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her parents were Louise Wilm and Gustav Ludwig von Salomé, a German-born Russian army officer of French Huguenot descent. As a teenager, she studied philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature privately with a Dutch pastor, Hendrik Gillot. In 1879, after her father's death, she moved to Zurich, Switzerland with her mother and enrolled at the University of Zürich, one of the few European universities that accepted women. Lou and her mother traveled in 1882 to Rome, where the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche fell in love with her, but she rejected his marriage proposal as well as that of his friend, Paul Rée. In 1887, she married Friedrich Carl Andreas, a professor of linguistics at the University of Göttingen, but continued to see other men; the couple separated by 1898 but stayed married until his death. In 1897, she and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 14 years her junior, fell in love; she became his lover, muse, and one of the greatest influences on his life and work. Her own literary career began in 1885 with the publication of a well-received autobiographical novel, Im Kampf um Gott. She went on to publish more novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, criticism, philosophy, and biographies. In 1911, at age 50, she started on a second career as a psychoanalyst after joining Sigmund Freud's circle in Vienna. By the early 1920s she was widely recognized as an analyst, and wrote essays on the relationship between psychology and creativity. She wrote her memoirs, published posthumously in 1951, and translated into English for the first time in 1991 as Looking Back. Her correspondence with Rilke was published in 1952.