Sofia Nădejde

She displayed deep familiarity with contemporary European philosophical and scientific thinking, referencing John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and August Bebel.

Writing in Contemporanul, she began a campaign against the then-common idea that women's smaller brains precluded them from attaining a higher spiritual plane or participating in politics.

Starting in 1886 and under the influence of Marxism, she began to focus on social inequality in general, seeing women's status as a byproduct of capitalism and private ownership.

In 1899, together with her husband and a significant faction, she left the socialist movement, convinced it had no basis to take hold in agrarian Romania, and lost her interest in political engagement, shifting instead toward literature.

She translated Jules Verne, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Edmondo De Amicis, Prosper Mérimée, Matilde Serao, Karl May, Camille Flammarion, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, André Theuriet, Ivan Turgenev, Charles Dickens and Andrei Nekrasov.

In her fiction, Nădejde imported the ideas and concerns of her journalistic work, cultivating the notion of "art with tendency" theorized by Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.