[2] In 1810 or 1811[c] her father was called to a position in St. Petersburg to aid in the revision of the criminal code,[2] and during this time she was even further denied instructions, though she read voraciously ("unendlich viel"), especially books on history.

[f] She translated Walter Scott's Old Mortality and The Black Dwarf, which she published under the pseudonym "Ernst Berthold" (Halle, 1822), but this she purportedly did so for a little "pin-money" and "against her own inclination".

[g] Talvj was the pen name she invented, an acrostic formed from the initials of her maiden name (née Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob) which she would use to sign her works thereafter, beginning with Psyche (1825), a collection of three short stories.

[7] After receiving from Goethe much encouragement through correspondence and meetings in person, her translation Volkslieder der Serben ('Folk songs of the Serbs') appeared in 1826.

Goethe glowingly recommended her creation in Kunst und Altertum, and compared her efforts which were in popularly accessible language favorably against Grimm's strict literal translations.

[12] The following year, she resumed her literary activity in her own right, first[h] translating into German John Pickering's "Indian Languages of North America" printed in Encyclopedia Americana (1830–1831), which appeared as Über die Indianischen Sprachen Amerikas (1834).

Pickering's work proposed a standard orthography for phonetically transcribing Native American words to remedy the fact that scholars from different nationalities adopted inconsistent romanization schemes.

[4][8][19] The literati who frequented their New York home were George Bancroft, William Cullen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, and Frederick Law Olmsted.

[21] Other works in the German language were: Aus der Geschichte der ersten Ansiedelungen in den Vereinigten Staaten (Extracts from the history of the first settlement of the United States; 1845), Die Colonisation von Neu England (The colonization of New England; 1847), imperfectly translated into English by William Hazlitt, Jr.,[1] Three tales originally published in German were translated into English by her daughter, appearing under the titles of Heloise, or the Unrevealed Secret (New York, 1850), Life's Discipline: a Tale of the Annals of Hungary (1851), and The Exiles (1853).