Pavlina Pajk


Pavlina Pajk, née Doljak was an early Slovene poet, novelist, essay writer and biographer.

Biography

Born in Pavia in the north of Italy, Pajk's parents were Slovenes. She first received an Italian education but after her parents had died, when she was 16 she moved to stay with her uncle in Solkan, Slovenia. She published her first collection of poems, Prva Ljibezen in 1873. When she was 22, she fell in love with Janko Pajk, a Slovenian professor and editor. They arranged the wedding before they even met and when they got married they moved first to Maribor then to Austria where she lived for the next 20 years. She wrote for Slovenian papers while living in Austria. She had a son named Milan and when he got a teaching job in Ljubljana Pavlina and her husband moved to Ljubljana where Pavlina Pajk died in 1901.
While her poetry was acclaimed by the critics, her prose works, which included six novels, were said to be less successful. In 1876, she also wrote an extensive obituary of George Sand, and went on to write other shorter obituaries. In 1893 and 1895 a two part collection of her works was published. Pajk was also the first Slovene author to support the case for women with an article in 1884, striving for the elementary schooling of women of all social classes.

Works