Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg

	'Tilli' Wolff-Mönckeberg in 1916 when she was 37

MATHILDE WOLFF-MÖNCKEBERG (1879-1958) was the seventh child of a Hamburg lawyer (who later became Lord Mayor). She was well educated and after finishing school went to study singing and Italian in Florence, where she married a Dutch art historian, André Jolles. They lived in Freiberg and then Berlin, where they brought up five children. ‘Tilli’ did translations, including, in 1923, Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages from Dutch into German. After her marriage broke down she returned to Hamburg, and in 1925 married Emil Wolff, a Professor of English who was Rector of Hamburg University until his death in 1952. On The Other Side consists of the unsent wartime letters she wrote to her children who lived abroad; they were edited and translated by her youngest daughter Ruth Evans in the 1970s (at about the same time as Vere Hodgson was editing her own wartime letters as Few Eggs And No Oranges, Persephone Book No. 9).