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Gertrud von Le Fort (October 11, 1876, Minden - November 1, 1971, Oberstdorf, Bavaria) was a German writer of novels, poems, and essays. She came from a Protestant background, but converted to Catholicism in 1926. Most of Le Fort's writings came after this conversion. In 1952 she won the Gottfried-Keller Prize, an esteemed Swiss literary award.
Her novella Die Letzte am Schafott (English: Last at the Scaffold), published in 1931,[1] was the original inspiration for the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites written by Francis Poulenc, which premiered in 1957. The opera was based on a libretto with this same title written by Georges Bernanos. The book was published in English in 1933 with the title of Song at the Scaffold.[2]
Among her many other works, Le Fort also published a book titled Die ewige Frau (English: The Eternal Woman) in 1934, which was published in paperback in English in 2010. In this work, she countered the modernist analysis on the feminine, not with polemical argument, but with a meditation on womanhood.[3]