Emma Simon

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emma Vely

Emma Simon (pseudonym and her real name some time after the divorce: Emma Vely , maiden name: Emma Couvely ; * August 8, 1848 in Braunfels , † May 5, 1934 in Berlin ) was a German writer and salonnière .

life and work

Emma Couvely was born into the Huguenot family of the arms manufacturer Heinrich Couvely and his wife Luise, daughter of the Hanoverian court armorer Carl Daniel Tanner (1791-1858). Her father died in 1851 and the mother returned with the children to her hometown. After a stay with an aunt in Herzberg am Harz , Emma Couvely attended a secondary school for girls in Hanover. She later worked as a kindergarten teacher after her desire to go to the theater was denied. She wrote her first novella when she was nineteen, and it was published in the Stuttgarter Allgemeine Familienzeitung under the pseudonym Emma Vely . In Stuttgart in 1871 she married the editor of the family newspaper and later publisher and bookseller Carl F. Simon, with whom she moved to Herzberg am Harz in 1878. The marriage was unhappy and ultimately divorced.

In 1889 Emma Simon-Vely went to Berlin with her daughter - one son had died early. She worked as a writer and columnist. A gathering of friends and acquaintances from the literary, newspaper and theater world of Berlin, held weekly on Mondays in her apartment at Maaßenstrasse 14, developed into a social meeting point for bourgeois-liberal circles in the tradition of literary salons. The regular guests included Heinrich Rickert , Ludwig Bamberger , Julius Stinde , Otto Erich Hartleben , Ernst von Wildenbruch , Arthur Levysohn , Ludwig Barnay and Hedwig Niemann-Raabe .

Emma Vely was a writer in the women's movement . She wrote for the magazine Die Frau , was in close contact with Anna Schepeler-Lette and Hedwig Dohm and was on friendly terms with Fanny Lewald . In her novels, too, she campaigned for an improvement in the position of women, including through better schooling for girls.

Her daughter Lolo Vely became an actress and was also active as a writer.

Parts of Emma Simon-Vely's estate are stored in the German Literature Archive in Marbach , in the archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . and kept in the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt .

Honors

For her historical work, Duke Karl von Württemberg and Franziska von Hohenheim , Emma Simon received the Great Gold Medal for Art and Science on the ribbon of the Order of the Württemberg Crown from King Wilhelm II of Württemberg.

Sources and literature

  • Vely, Emma . In: Sophie Pataky (Hrsg.): Lexicon of German women of the pen . Volume 2. Verlag Carl Pataky, Berlin 1898, p. 388 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Petra Wilhelmy: The Berlin salons: With historical-literary walks . P. 366 ff Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2000. ISBN 978-3-11-016414-5
  • Emma Vely: My beautiful and difficult life . Frankenstein, Leipzig 1929. (autobiography)

Web links

Wikisource: Emma Simon  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Inventory A: Vely (accessed March 14, 2013)
  2. ↑ Vely, Emma (accessed March 12, 2013)
  3. ↑ Eckhart G. Franz:  NACHLASS VELY  (= Repertories Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt ) holdings O 59 Vely (PDF; 16 KB). In: Archive Information System Hessen (Arcinsys Hessen), status: January 1994, accessed on September 22, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Simon, Emma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vely, Emma (pseudonym); Couvely, Emma (maiden name); Simon-Vely, Emma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunfels
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 1934
Place of death Berlin