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Alice Schalek’s story deserves to be known in the English speaking world. She was Austria’s first female war correspondent and the only woman in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be accredited to the Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) during World War One for any length of time. Her articles and public lectures on life at the front line were both popular and controversial, and her unique style and passionate personal involvement with her work won her both acclaim and criticism. She observed some of the bloodiest and most futile battles in what was, at that time, by far the most horrendous war the world had ever known. She set out to get a feel for how life was for ordinary soldiers in front line positions, and was frequently in great danger for extended periods of time. She had no tradition of war reporting to fall back on and struggled to make sense of the genocidal madness she saw. For English speakers she also has the importance that she saw and interpreted the Great War from the other side of the lines.

But even without her wartime journalism, Schalek would still be a figure worth knowing. She was a successful Viennese novelist, who broke into that male dominated domain at the beginning of the twentieth century by disguising herself as a male author. She was a passionate mountain climber, becoming a full member of the Austrian Mountaineers’ Society at the age of 21. An intrepid globe-trotter, she journeyed to more corners of the world than most of us could ever hope to, even in our liberated, jet age. She wrote feature articles for her newspaper, the eue Freie Presse (New Free Press) for 30 years, and was the first woman member of the …