[1][2][3] She was born in Vienna to Hofrat Franz Sales von Greiner (1730–1798) and his wife Charlotte, née Hieronymus (1739–1815).
As a young girl, Caroline met Haydn and was a pupil of Mozart,[4] who regularly performed music at the Greiners' residence.
[5] Through her husband's encouragement and her own desires she led a salon for many years that was the center of the literary life in the Austrian capital.
[1] Her early works, Olivier, first published anonymously (1802), Idyllen (1803) and Ruth (1805), though displaying considerable talent, were immature.
She made her mark in historical romance, and the first of her novels of this class, Agathokles (1808), written as an answer to Edward Gibbon's disparagement of Christianity in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attained great popularity.