Karoline Pierson

Karoline Wilhelmine Pierson , also: Caroline , née Leonhardt , divorced Lyser , pseudonym : R. Edmund Hahn (born January 6, 1811 in Zittau ; † April 2, 1899 in Coswig (Saxony) ) was a German improvisation artist and writer.

Caroline Leonhardt during her marriage to Johann Peter Lyser

Karoline Pierson 1899

Live and act

Karoline Leonhardt was the daughter of the Zittau merchant Carl Gottlob Leonhard (* in Leipzig; † February 27, 1814 in Zittau ) and his wife Carolina Wilhelmina Pfeiffer (* October 17, 1785 in Zittau; † January 12, 1811 there). The mother died shortly after she was born. The father married Christiane Caroline Henriette Noack on February 15, 1814 (* May 16, 1789). When the father died three years later, her stepmother married the royal on November 3, 1817. Saxon Captain Johann Carl Adolph Dreverhoff, who became her stepfather. She grew up in the house of her step-grandparents in Upper Lusatia , showed talent at an early age in improvising verse and had a beautiful singing voice.

After school she went to Dresden and worked as a writer there. It found recognition and support from Johann Friedrich Kind and Ludwig Tieck . In 1834 she went public with a collection of her poems under the title Liederkranz . Friedrich Rückert gave these songs warm praise; they were set to music by, among others, Carl Gottlieb Reissiger , Ernst Julius Otto , Carl Eduard Hering and Otto Nicolai . She created the librettos for the operas Conradin von Schwaben (1834, music by CE Hering) and Bertha von Bretagne (1835, music by Joseph Rastrelli ) .

In 1836 she married the writer and painter Johann Peter Lyser . The marriage was not happy and they divorced again in 1842. In early 1840, she began a relationship with the British composer Henry Hugo Pierson . During this time she wrote numerous short stories and dramas. Her preoccupation with the life of Anna Louisa Karsch encouraged her to work as an impromptu poet. From 1839 to 1843 she performed with great success as an improviser and toured the stages and courts of Central Europe.

In 1844 she married Pierson. For his sake, she gave up her previous job as an impromptu poet. She subsequently lived with her family, which included three sons and a daughter, as well as two sons and a daughter from her first marriage, in Vienna, Mainz, Würzburg, Stuttgart, Hamburg and most recently in Leipzig. In 1878 she became a widow and since then has lived mainly in Dresden.

From 1860 she was again active as a writer; She published a number of novels under the pseudonym R. Edmund Hahn . An article in the gazebo from 1874 described her career and celebrated her as Germany's Corinna .

Reginald Henry Holmer Pierson (1846–1906) ran the Lindenhof sanatorium (today Coswig Specialist Hospital) in Coswig (Saxony) from 1880 onwards, where she last lived. The other two sons Edgar Mansfield Pierson (1848–1919) and Henry Pierson (1851–1902) founded the then well-known Pierson'schen Verlag in Dresden after their studies, which Edgar later managed successfully alone, while Henry was the artistic director of the Royal Drama in Berlin became. The publicist and co-founder of the first satirical papers of the labor movement in Germany, Gustav Lyser (1841–1909), emigrated to the USA in 1874, came from her first marriage to Johann Peter Lyser.

Works

• Posts in Occidental Thousand and One Nights. 1838–39 and Occidental One Hundred and One Nights. 1840
• Character pictures for German women and girls. 1838
• Novellas. 1842
• Master Albrecht Dürer. Drama, 1840; 2nd ed. 1871
• Autumn
  edition 1839–41 new edition as ten novellas. 1842
• The document. 1865
• Starhemberg or: The Citizens of Vienna. 1865
• A year in the big world. 1866
• The gray house on rue Richelieu. 1867
• Hohenzollern and Welfen. 3 volumes 1867–69
• Hrawodar Castle. 1870
• The slavery of love. 1872
• The wrong countess. 1873
• The diplomat's pupil. 1876
• Married too early. 1876
• Beautiful women. 1881
• In the park of Rodenstein. 1881
• The two countesses. 1884
• The secrets of the forest castle. 1885
• Marriages are made in heaven. 1886
• The hereditary maid. 1889

literature

• C. Beyer: Germany's Corinna . In: The Gazebo . Volume 44, 1874, pp. 711-713 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
• Franz Brümmer :  Pierson, Karoline . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 53, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1907, p. 58 f.
• Lina Morgenstern: The women of the 19th century: biographical and cultural-historical time and character paintings. Deutsche Hausfrauenzeitung 1891, pp. 145f.
• Elisabeth Friedrichs: The German-speaking women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries: a lexicon. Metzler 1981, ISBN 3-476-00456-2 , p. 234.
• Art achievements in Zittau . 2) The Zittauische Corilla . In: New Lusatian magazine. NF 5 = 18.1840 (1840) , Nachrichten aus der Lausitz, 1840, 1st piece, pp. 23-26.

Web links

Wikisource: Karoline Pierson  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Karoline Pierson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Karoline Pierson in the Gutenberg-DE project
• Entry at sachsen.digital
• Petra Hamann: Medical Councilor Dr. med. Reginald H. Pierson - On the 100th anniversary of the death of a Coswiger personality of supraregional importance .