Meta Forkel-Liebeskind (1765–1853)

Margarethe "Meta" Forkel-Liebeskind, née Wedekind, was born in Göttingen, a university city in Lower Saxony, Germany. Her father Rudolph Wedekind was a pastor and professor. Within the scholarly atmosphere of her parents' home, Meta received an education far more extensive than that usually given to girls of that era. She belonged to the group of 18th-century Göttingen scholars' daughters known as the Universitätsmamsellen that included Caroline Schlegel Schelling, Philippine Engelhard, Therese Huber, and Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer. In 1781, at age 16, Meta married Johann Nikolaus Forkel, a musicologist; but the couple soon separated, and she moved with their son Karl Gottlieb, born in 1782, to live with relatives in Einbeck. There she wrote Maria, a novel in two volumes that was published anonymously in 1784. She then went to Berlin with her new lover, theology student Carl Günther Friedrich Seidel. In Berlin, she obtained commissions for translations of works from English and French. In the summer of 1789 she left Berlin and moved in with her brother Georg Wedekind, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of Mainz. Georg Forster, the naturalist and travel writer, from whom Meta received further translation commissions, also lived in Mainz at the time. Some of the translations appeared under Forster's name, although today the contribution of each contributor is difficult to determine. In 1789, Meta returned to Göttingen to arrange her financial affairs, which were precarious despite her thriving translating career. It appeared that her husband, having used up her dowry, was embezzling her translation fees. In Göttingen, she met and fell in love with Johann Heinrich Liebeskind, a musically gifted law student. She went back to Mainz in October 1792, and stayed with Caroline Böhmer (later Schlegel Schelling). Meta was drawn into the turbulent events surrounding the founding of the Republic of Mainz, inspired by the French Revolution. When the end of the Mainz Republic became imminent, Meta, her mother, sister-in-law Wilhelmine Wedekind, and Caroline tried to escape to Frankfurt but were arrested and taken to Königstein Fortress. They were not released until July 1793. After Meta was freed from imprisonment, she and Liebeskind made their way to East Prussia, where he was to start his first job with the civil service. In 1794, she obtained a divorce from Forkel and remarried to Liebeskind. They had five children together. In the decades that followed, Meta accompanied her husband to his various postings. These included Riga, Königsberg, Ansbach, Bamberg, Munich, Landshut, and Eichstätt. Meta continued to work as a prolific translator throughout these years. Among her most famous translations was The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1791), Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (1792), and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1797).