orig. Anna Elisabeth Franziska Adolphine Wilhelmine Louise Maria, Freiin von Droste zu Hülshoff
born Jan. 10, 1797, Schloss Hülshoff, near Münster, Westphalia
died May 25, 1848, Meersburg, Baden
German writer.
One of the great women poets of Germany, she wrote religious verse, particularly Das geistliche Jahr (1851; "The Spiritual Year"), but she is best known for detailed, evocative poems about her native Westphalia. Her stories are considered forerunners of the 19th-century realistic short story. Her only complete prose work, The Jew's Beech (1842), is a psychological study of a villager who murders a Jew.