Margaret L. Goldsmith

Margaret Leland Goldsmith (1894-1971) was an American journalist, historical novelist and translator who lived and worked primarily in England. One of her best known translations is popular German writer Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives for the first UK edition in 1931. Goldsmith spent some of her childhood in Germany, where she attended school and learned to speak German fluently. She then studied at Illinois Woman’s College in Jacksonville, Illinois and gained an MA from the University of Illinois. During World War I she was on the staff of the war trade board under Bernard Baruch. She then worked for the national chamber of commerce in Washington and the international chamber of commerce in Paris, helping Wesley Clair Mitchell with his 1919 report on international price comparisons. Returning to Berlin as a research assistant in the office of the commercial attaché of the American Embassy, she became one of the first women to be appointed an assistant trade commissioner from 1923-1925. In 1926 she married Frederick Voigt, the Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930, although the couple divorced in 1935. While living in Berlin she worked as an agent representing English-speaking authors. She was a friend of author Katharine Burdekin (pseudonym Murray Constantine), with whom she co-authored the historical novel based on Marie-Antoinette, Venus in Scorpio: A Romance in Versailles, 1770-1793 (1940). Goldsmith’s other novels were Karin’s Mother (1928); Belated Adventure (1929); and the German language novel Patience geht Vorüber: ein Roman (1931). Her non-fiction publications included Frederick the Great (1929); Hindenburg: The Man and the Legend (with Frederick Voigt, 1930); (1933); Franz Anton Mesmer: The History of an Idea (1934); John the Baptist: A Modern Interpretation (1935); and Florence Nightingale: The Woman and the Legend (1937). Goldsmith died in 1971.