Elisabeth de Waal was born in Vienna in 1899. She studied philosophy, law and economics at the University of Vienna, and completed her doctorate in 1923. She also wrote poems (often corresponding with Rilke), and was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Columbia. She wrote five unpublished novels, two in German and three in English, including THE EXILES RETURN in the late 1950s. She died in 1991.

Books by Elisabeth de Waal

The Exiles Return

by Elisabeth de Waal - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Vienna is demolished by war, the city an alien landscape of ruined castles, a fractured ruling class, and people picking up the pieces. THE EXILES RETURN is the postwar story of Austria’s fallen aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence. Elisabeth de Waal’s novel follows a number of exiles, each returning under very different circumstances, who must come to terms with a city in painful recovery.