Colours and Years

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Margit Kaffka (1880-1918) was born in the provincial town of Nagykároly (now Carei in Romania). A schoolteacher by training, she was twice married with a son, and as a friend wrote about her, 'She wielded her pen as our mothers did their mixing spoons.' faking up her maiden name as a writer, she soon turned to writing both poetry and prose, and became part of the small circle of distinguished writers who ran the literary journal Nyugat. She sat with the men in smoky coffee-houses and wrote1 short stories about women who achieved financial independence but suffered many unfulfilled dreams and were faced with impossibly difficult choices. Her novel, Colours and Years, which came out in 1912, explored the complexities facing different generations of these new women and catapulted her to success. Based on the technique of the talking head, it reveals not only the character of the writer herself, her background and history, with special emphasis on her relationship to her mother, but life as it was lived just before the First World War in the small Hungarian town of Nagykároly. The poet Endre Ady's words stand as a fitting tribute to her even today: 'Let us rejoice in Margit Kaffka because she proves the triumph of Hungarian feminism... She is a strong person, an artist with an assured future: no criticism can hinder her true destiny the path marked as her own'.
menej