Austrian · 1920–1970
Marlen Haushofer wrote The Wall (1963) about a woman who wakes in an Alpine hunting lodge to find an invisible barrier sealing her off from a world in which everything living appears to have died where it stood. What follows is not a disaster novel but an inventory: potatoes planted, hay cut, a cow milked, a dog fed, all recorded by a narrator who has decided that keeping a written account is the last thing separating her from the animals she tends. Haushofer published it to little attention. She lived in the small Austrian town of Steyr as a dentist's wife, wrote in the mornings, and produced her books largely without her family's interest. Her earlier novels — including The Loft and Nowhere Ending Sky — worked the same territory of domestic confinement, though none matched The Wall's severity. She won the Arthur Schnitzler Prize in 1963 and died of bone cancer in 1970, aged forty-nine. The Wall was rediscovered by feminist critics in the 1980s and is now the Austrian post-war novel most read outside Austria.