Arabella Spencer studied German and philosophy at King’s College London and literary translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She has lived in Munich and Seville and currently lives in London.
“Major Austrian woman of letters, Hilde Spiel, has given us an elegantly crafted study of the Berlin-born, Viennese Jewish Fanny von Arnstein, who entered high society because she was beautiful, rich, highly intelligent, and extraordinarily well connected. What makes this book so successful in illuminating Fanny’s life is that Spiel situates her in the precarious, often-times absurd, and almost exclusively anti-Semitic history of early modern and modern European Jewry, drawing on quotations from a wide range of documents. Spiel’s daughter, Christine Shuttleworth, is a masterful translator of her mother’s masterpiece.”
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Shulamit Reinharz, director of the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center
Arabella Spencer