Margit Kaffka (10 June 1880 – 1 December 1918) was a Hungarian writer and poet.
Called a "great, great writer" by Endre Ady, she was one of the most important female Hungarian authors, and an important member of the Nyugat generation. Her writing was inspired by József Kiss, Mihály Szabolcska, and the writers' group of the periodical A Hét.
Personal life
Margit Kaffka was born on 10 June 1880 in Nagykároly (today Carei, Romania) into a family of minor Hungarian nobility (see her family's genealogy in Records of the Tötösy de Zepetnek Family). Her father was a public prosecutor, but died early and the family lived under reduced circumstances. She received a scholarship to study at the Sisters of Mercy teacher's training college in Szatmár and in return she taught for one year in Miskolc. She studied in Budapest, receiving a teacher's diploma from the Erzsébet Girls' School. She returned to Miskolc, where she taught literature and economics in a private girls' school, beloved by students. This is the period when her first writings, poems, and novels appeared. She subsequently became a full-time contributor to Nyugat, the most important periodical of the era.
She married Brunó Fröhlich, a forestry officer, on 17 February 1905. In 1907 her husband moved to the Ministry of Agriculture, enabling Kaffka to move away from Miskolc, a town she did not like. However, their marriage became stressed after a few years, and ended in a divorce. Kaffka worked as a teacher in Budapest between 1910 and 1915. During this time, she published her best known work, Színek és évek (1912) (Colors and Years). She married for the second time in 1914 to Ervin Bauer, the younger brother of Béla Balázs. At the beginning of the First World War she left her teaching job to focus full-time on her literary work. She died in the 1918 flu pandemic along with her young son.
