Born: 23 October 1807, Ireland
Died: 12 November 1893
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: Baroness von Tautphoeus
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Nicholas Allen. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Tautphoeus, Jemima Montgomery von (1807–93), Baroness, novelist, was born 23 October 1807 in Seaview, Co. Donegal, daughter of James Montgomery , landowner and brother of Sir Henry Conyngham Montgomery (d. 1830), and Jemima Montgomery (née Glasgow). Nothing is known of her life before her marriage (29 January 1838) to Cajetan Joseph Friedrich, Baron von Tautphoeus of Marquardtstein castle and chamberlain to the king of Bavaria. She spent the rest of her life with him in Bavaria and wrote four novels that William Makepeace Thackeray considered among the best representations of German life in the English language. The initials (1850) is a two-volume romance of mistaken identity that tells the adventures of Hamilton, an enigmatic young English gentleman, among the Alps. Quits (1857) is a romance of changing fortunes, as its central character, a young English lady named Leonara Nixon, is courted by Torp, a besotted English gentleman who wins her from his German rival in the novel’s badly managed climax. Neither work ever admits sensuality to its pages. Of her other novels, Cyrilla (1853) describes a German trial, while At odds (1863) is a final romance. She is now almost forgotten; details of her life are as obscure as her critical standing, but she is important as a nineteenth-century Irish novelist engaged with continental Europe. Disaster struck in 1885 with the death, within two weeks of each other, of both her husband and her only son, Rudolf Edgeworth Josef von Tautphoeus, Bavarian minister to the Italian court. She died in Munich on 12 November 1893 and is buried there.