Myself, Four Times

Long unpublished and presumed lost, Myself, Four Times reveals Maria Lazar as a bold, psychologically acute feminist writer whose work deserves a central place in twentieth-century European literature.Myself, Four Times is a rediscovered novel of friendship, desire, and self-invention by Maria Lazar (1895–1948), one of the most incisive and unjustly neglected voices of interwar Austrian literature. Written in Vienna in the late 1920s but never published in Lazar’s lifetime, the novel appears now for the first time, drawn from her literary estate.The book follows four women—friends since their school days—whose lives unfold in strikingly different directions, yet remain inseparably bound from adolescence into adulthood. Set against the backdrop of the not-so-golden 1920s, it traces shared youth and first love alongside the darker currents of friendship: self-deception, betrayal, jealousy, and emotional manipulation. At the same time, Lazar charts women’s struggles for independence, identity, and fulfillment in a society poised between liberation and collapse.With psychological acuity and social sharpness, Myself, Four Times captures both the exhilaration and the cost of female solidarity. Its long suppression mirrors Lazar’s own fate: a celebrated writer forced into exile by Nazism, silenced after she died in 1948, and only recently reclaimed as a major figure of twentieth-century European literature.

Maria Lazar (1895–1948) was an Austrian-Jewish novelist, playwright, and journalist whose socially incisive, anti-fascist writing flourished in the interwar years. Writing at times under the pseudonym Esther Grenen, she went into exile in Scandinavia after 1933. Long neglected after she died in 1948, her work has been rediscovered since the 2010s. Myself, Four Times is the first English translation of Lazar’s work. Isabel Fargo Cole is a US-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. She is the initiator and coeditor of No Man’s Land, an online magazine for new German literature in English.