Hilde Spiel (19 October 1911 – 30 November 1990) (pseudonyms: Grace Hanshaw and Jean Lenoir) was an Austrian writer and journalist who received numerous awards and honours.

[1][2]: 57  Her parents, who became Roman Catholics as adults,[3] were Hugo F. Spiel, an engineering research chemist and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and Marie (née Gutfeld).

[2]: 104 ff  From 1933 to 1935 she worked at the Industrial Psychological Research Centre at the University of Vienna; in 1933 she joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party (which was banned in 1934) and wrote her first two novels, Kati auf der Brücke and Verwirrung am Wolfgangsee.

It was not until the late 1960s that she translated her English-language report into German, editing and expanding it substantially; it was published in 1968 under the title Rückkehr nach Wien (Return to Vienna).

Here she was active as a drama critic for Die Welt as well as the New Statesman, La France Libre, the Berlin Tagesspiegel and the weekly magazine sie.

In the postwar years she was one of the most important literary critics in the German-speaking world, and promoted the breakthrough of the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer among others.

In 1963 she finally returned to Austria, where she continued to work as a cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and published several volumes of essays and her memoirs.

After her separation from Peter de Mendelssohn in 1963 and her divorce in 1970, she was married, from 1972 until his death in 1981, to the writer and retired BBC employee Hans Flesch von Brunningen.