She served as the executive member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature (1933–1939) during the interwar period.

Nałkowska was born into a family of intellectuals dedicated to issues of social justice, and studied at the clandestine Flying University under the Russian partition.

Upon Poland's return to independence and the establishment of the Second Polish Republic she became one of the country's most distinguished feminist writers of novels, novellas and stage-plays characterized by socio-realism and psychological depth.

In her writing, Nałkowska boldly tackled difficult and controversial subjects,[1] professing in her 1932 article "Organizacja erotyzmu" (Structure of Eroticism) published in the Wiadomości Literackie magazine – the premier literary periodical in Poland at the time – that:

It has its ramifications within all domains of human life and it is not possible to separate it from them by way of contemptuous disparagement in the name of morality, discretion, or yet by a demotion on the hierarchy of subjects worthy of intellectual attention: it cannot be isolated by prudery or relegated to science for its purely biological dimension.