Wilhelmine von Hillern

Wilhelmine von Hillern (1836–1916) was a German novelist and actress, the daughter of the popular playwright Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer. She acted on the stage until her marriage in 1857 to a magistrate in Freiburg, after which she turned to fiction. Her best-known novel, Die Geier-Wally (1875), the story of a defiant mountain girl of the Tyrol, became an opera by Catalani, La Wally, and was filmed several times. Am Kreuz (1890), translated as On the Cross, drew on her long acquaintance with the village of Oberammergau and its Passion Play. In her later years she lived in Oberammergau itself.