Austrian novelist, born at Vienna on the 7th of September 1769, the daughter of Hofrat Franz von Greiner, and married, in 1796, Andreas Pichler, a government official. For many years her salon was the centre of the literary life in the Austrian capital, where she died on the 9th of July 1843. Her early works, Olivier, first published anonymously (1802), Idyllen (1803) and Ruth (1805), though displaying considerable talent, were immature. She made her mark in historical romance, and the first of her novels of this class, Agathocles (1808), an answer to Gibbon’s attack on that hero in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attained great popularity. Among her other novels may be mentioned Die Belagerung Wiens (1824); Die Schweden in Prag (1827); Die Wiedereroberung Ofens (1829) and Henriette von England (1832). Her last work was Zeitbilder (1840).
The edition of Caroline Pichler’s Sämtliche Werke (1820–1845) comprises no less than 60 volumes. Her Denkwurdigkeiten aus meinem Leben (4 vols.) was published posthumously in 1844. A selection of her narratives, Ausgewählte Erzählungen, appeared in 4 vols. in 1894.
