"Thus Spoke a Woman" by Margit Kaffka is a scattering of short and slow stories, mostly (but not only) about love, often unfulfilled, about very young girls and grown women, about interested glances and alluring smiles, about conversations and secrets. Stories snatched from life, overheard conversations, imbued with the spirit of the Art Nouveau era. Small, unnoticeable stories, subtle and charming, like their heroines, who for the first time in Hungarian literature found a voice. Reading this tactful prose is pure pleasure.

This small collection was first published in 1906. Margit Kaffka, the first woman in Hungary to become a famous writer, was twenty-six at the time, and had several more books ahead of her, including long novels, teaching, two marriages, the First World War, and death from Spanish flu at the age of thirty-eight.