Laura Gonzenbach

Laura Gonzenbach (1842–1878) was a Swiss fairy tale collector, active in Messina, who collected fairy tales in a number of Sicilian dialects.

Gonzenbach was born in a Swiss-German community of Sicily, to a German-speaking mercantile family. (Her sister, Magdelena, began a school in Messina.) She became well educated and gained renown for the stories she gathered from a diverse range of sources, often other women. After the prompting of Otto Hartwig for material to append to a historical survey of the country, she produced what would become an important two volume collection, Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian folk-tales), published in 1870. Her seminal works collected tales given verbally, by peasants or other working and middle classes; the assemblage is noted as one of the few major collections of the nineteenth century to be compiled by a woman.

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