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 Barbora Panklova, cultivated her genius, which had already shown itself, under the guidance of literary men with whom she came in contact in Prague, where her husband, an official in the Austrian government service, was stationed for a while. Through her husband’s necessarily frequent removals she became well acquainted with various parts of Bohemia and also made five extended sojourns in Slovensko (Slovakia), where she studied the people and collected the customs, traditions, tales and folk lore in general which she later used untouched in her collections of fairy tales and legends, or wove into short stories and novels whose characters and plots were her own creation. Then, too, her intimate knowledge of the people among whom she lived and sought her friends aided materially in giving her a true insight into their souls as well as a thorough knowledge of the dialects pre dominating in each section which she later took as the background for her stories.

Němcová’s initial literary efforts (1844–1848) were made in the field of lyric poetry which expressed a deeply patriotic feeling. She felt that women should participate in the nationalistic struggles of the Czechs who were emerging from two centuries of the tomb after their crushing defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. All her later writings likewise breathe her Slavonic sympathies.

Very soon after her poems began to appear she was urged by Karel Jaromir Erben, one of the fore-