Therese Megerle von Mühlfeld


Therese Megerle von Mühlfeld was an Austrian writer and translator who came to prominence, primarily, as a dramatist.

Life

Therese Pop was born in Pressburg, the daughter of a Hungarian landowner. She was only 16 when in 1829 she married Georg Johann Wilhelm Megerle von Mühlfeld in Preßburg. He was a surgeon and dentist. His bride came to the marriage with 60,000 Gulden, which was a very substantial dowry. It enabled Megerle to embark on a change of career. He abandoned his medical work and took over the city theatre. Later, in 1850, he took over at the Theater in der Josefstadt on the western side of Vienna. Partly through a lack of business acumen and partly through bad luck he managed to lose all his money. The Josefstadt theatre was well established and apparently busy during the four years he spent there. Nevertheless, as one commentator observed, he was neither the first nor the last theatre director who came to grief at the Josefstadt. After becoming bankrupt Megerle died, at which point it is said that he left for his wife nothing but a suit.
In the middle of all this sadness, his widow displayed remarkable energy as she set about building herself a career as a dramatist. She had already begun to establish herself as a writer, with novellas and short stories published in magazines or journals such as :de:Sonntagsblätter|Sonntagsblätter and its successor publication, "Ludwig Augustus Frankl's Abendzeitung", and she had thereby met with some modest success. A collection of her pieces was published in three volumes in 1844 under the title "Novellen und Erzählungen". One critic found it "very entertaining, full of life and action". One of her novels, "Die beiden Graßel", reached no fewer than five editions, and a stage adaptation of it which she herself wrote then in 1848 ran for eighty evenings without a break. She became progressively more creative and prolific as a dramatist, and also found time to adapt English and French novels along with other frequently colourful sources, producing probably more than fifty lively and effective stage works pieces, though at least one serious commentator believed that her output was devoid of artistic worth. A flavour of her output can be gleaned from the titles of some of the productions of her plays:
Her final piece was called "Die Eselshaut", a reworking from a French piece, for which authorship was attributed to her son, Julius.