Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska

Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, born Kossak, was a Polish poet and dramatist of the interwar years, nicknamed the «Polish Sappho». She wrote in Polish during the Second Polish Republic, between 1918 and the German invasion of 1939. Her importance lies in renewing lyric poetry of her time and in bringing taboo subjects to the stage.

She was born in Kraków in 1891, into a family of painters. Her grandfather Juliusz Kossak and her father Wojciech Kossak were known for their historical scenes and horses, and her younger sister Magdalena Samozwaniec became a satirical writer. In her youth she split her time between painting and poetry, but her marriage to Jan Pawlikowski pushed her toward literature. After her divorce she moved in Warsaw's circle around the Skamander poets, alongside Julian Tuwim and Jan Lechoń.

Between 1918 and 1939 she published twelve volumes of verse, light and direct, with love, sensuality and irony at the centre. From 1924 she also wrote for the theatre, and by 1939 she had fifteen plays, many of them comedies that dealt with abortion, affairs and incest. Critics compared her to Molière, Marivaux and Oscar Wilde. Her plays treated motherhood as a painful duty that ends mutual passion, and she argued for a woman's right to choose.

When war broke out in 1939 she followed her third husband, Stefan Jasnorzewski, to England. She was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1944 and died in Manchester on 9 July 1945, cared for to the end by her husband. Her work remains a reference point for twentieth-century Polish poetry, where she is remembered as one of its most original voices.