Margit Kaffka was a Hungarian

Hungary

Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...

 writer and poet.

Called a "great, great writer" by Endre Ady

Endre Ady

Endre Ady was a Hungarian poet.-Biography:Ady was born in Érmindszent, Szilágy county . He belonged to an impoverished Calvinist noble family...

, she was one of the most important female Hungarian authors, and an important member of the Nyugat generation. Her writing was inspired by József Kiss

József Kiss

Lieutenant József Kiss was a World War I flying ace for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was credited with 19 aerial victories. He was the most successful Hungarian ace in the war....

, Mihály Szabolcska, and the writers' group of the periodical Hét.

Life

Margit Kaffka was born on June 2, 1880 in Nagykároly (today Carei, Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

). Her father was a public prosecutor, but died early on, so the family lived in poverty. With a scholarship, she learned in the Sisters of Mercy

Sisters of Mercy

The Religious Order of the Sisters of Mercy is an order of Catholic women founded by Catherine McAuley in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831. , the order has about 10,000 members worldwide, organized into a number of independent congregations....

 teacher's training college in Szatmár

Szatmár

Szatmár is the name of a historic administrative county of the Kingdom of Hungary. Its territory is presently in north-western Romania and north-eastern Hungary, south of the river Tisza...

; in return, she taught for one year in Miskolc

Miskolc

Miskolc is a city in northeastern Hungary, mainly with heavy industrial background. With a population close to 170,000 Miskolc is the fourth largest city of Hungary It is also the county capital of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and the regional centre of Northern Hungary.- Geography :Miskolc is located...

. She studied in Budapest

Budapest

Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

 later on, gaining a teacher's diploma in Erzsébet Girl's School. She returned to Miskolc, where she taught literature and economy in a private girl's school, beloved by students. This is the period when her first writings, poems and novels appeared, and she became a full-time contributor to Nyugat

Nyugat

Nyugat , was the most influential Hungarian literary journal in the first half of the 20th century. Writers and poets from that era are referred to as "1st/2nd/3rd generation of the NYUGAT"....

, the most important periodical of the era.

She married Brúnó Fröhlich, a forest officer, on February 17, 1905. In 1907 her husband was placed to the Ministry of Agriculture, so Kaffka was able to disconnect from Miskolc, a town she did not like. However, their marriage became stressed after a few years, and ending in a divorce. She was working as a teacher in Budapest between 1910–1915, marrying a second time on August 18, 1914, to the younger brother of Béla Balázs

Béla Balázs

----Béla Balázs , born Herbert Bauer, was a Hungarian-Jewish film critic, aesthete, writer and poet....

, Ervin Bauer

Ervin Bauer

Ervin Bauer was a Hungarian biologist.In 1935, he published a monograph "Theoretical biology", in which he described the general thermodynamical features of living systems...

. In the beginning of the First World War

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, she left her teaching job to live only for literature.

After the war, she became victim to the 1918 flu pandemic along with her young son.

Literature

Her works dealt mostly with two main themes: the fall of the gentry

Gentry

Gentry denotes "well-born and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past....

, and the physical and spiritual hardships of the independent women in the turn of the century. She often wrote about her personal memories of great national crises, the glaring oppositions of the anachronistic society in Hungary.

Her literary career can be divided into three chapters, from 1901 to the start of Nyugat in 1908, the second ending in the start of the war in 1918, the third marked by the hard years after the war, ending in her death.

1912 marked the release of her first, and most important novel, Színek és Évek (Colors and Years) dealing with the fate of the gentry class and women. Her second most famed work is Hangyaboly (Ant nest), collecting her memories from the years at Sisters of Mercy, published in 1917.

Major works

• Versek (1903)
• Levelek a zárdából (diary novel, 1904)
• A gondolkodók és egyéb elbeszélések (narratives, 1906)
• Csendes válságok (narratives, 1909)
• Képzelet-királyfiak (meseregény, 1909)
• Csendes válságok (narratives, 1910)
• Csonka regény és novellák (narratives, 1911)
• Tallózó évek (poems, 1911)
• Utolszor a lyrán (poems, 1912)
• Süppedő talajon (narratives, 1912)
• Színek és évek (novel, 1912)
• Mária évei (novel, 1913)
• Szent Ildefonso bálja (narratives, 1914)
• Két nyár (novel, 1916)
• Állomások (novel, 1917)
• Hangyaboly (novel, 1917)
• Kis emberek barátocskáim (collection of early works, 1918)
• Az élet útján (poems, 1918)
• A révnél (narratives, 1918)

Sources

• Magyar életrajzi lexikon (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1967)
• Kárpáti Béla: Miskolci irodalom, irodalom Miskolcon (Miskolc, 1989 ISBN 963-02-7150-8)
• A magyar irodalom története 1905-1919 (Budapest, 1965. ISBN 963-05-3592-0)