Laura Gonzenbach
Laura Gonzenbach was a Swiss fairy tale collector, active in Messina, who collected fairy tales in a number of Sicilian dialects.
Gonzenbach was born in a Swiss-German community of Sicily, to a German-speaking mercantile family. She became well educated and gained renown for the stories she gathered from a diverse range of sources, often other women. After the prompting of Otto Hartwig for material to append to a historical survey of the country, she produced what would become an important two volume collection, Sicilianische Märchen, published in 1870. Her seminal works collected tales given verbally, by peasants or other working and middle classes; the assemblage is noted as one of the few major collections of the nineteenth century to be compiled by a woman.
