MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH DID NOT write the novel of Viennese society that Paul Heyse hoped for, but Ada Christen did represent a different section of society in Vienna for the first time, namely, its suburban poor during the 1850s, in collections of sketches and stories in the 1870s and 1880s and in her novel Jungfer Mutter: Eine Wiener Vorstadtgeschichte (1892). This reorientation of the conventional view such as we have already seen in Wildermuth's tales of modest lives in the provinces or in Böhlau's Ratsmädelgeschichten looks back to the author's childhood experiences of the world of work at the margins of economic viability around the middle of the nineteenth-century. New too in Christen's literary voice is the direct expression of female sexuality in poems whose publication caused a scandal. Her works raise questions about identity and social and psychological determination frequently by exploring in retrospect the mistaken or unanticipated paths that individual lives have taken.

Ada Christen was born Christiane Frideriks into middle-class circumstances in Vienna but the family was reduced to poverty when her father died soon after his release from imprisonment for his part in the 1848 uprisings. Christen had a minimal education and earned her keep sewing gloves as a child, before becoming an actress at fifteen and appearing in supporting roles in the Meidlinger Theater.