Author. She is remembered as an acclaimed Czech author of folklore, folk tales, and poetry. She published four novels and at least a dozen folk stories. Her best-known work is the 1855 "Babička" or "The Grandmother", a tale of family life in rural Bohemia. The first translation of this work was into German in 1858, and since then the novel has been translated into forty languages and reprinted in Czech more than 350 times with numerous beautiful illustrations. Her name was Barbora, but in her works she used her artistic name Božena. There are several anecdotal sagas about who were actually her birth parents with some claiming she was the illegitimate daughter of a royal. The only parents that she knew were Jahann Pankel and his wife Teresie, who cared for her as a child when she lived in Ratibořice. She was a staunch patriot and supporter of Czech nationalism near the end of the popularity. She married a government employee, Josef Němec, who was fifteen years her senior, on September 12, 1837 in an unhappy, arranged marriage, and the couple had four children. The two did not even speak the same language and separated, leaving her in poverty with her children. Her husband's involvement in the failed revolution of 1848 had caused him to be transferred to Slovakia, and her literary activities had made her unwilling to leave the Czech literary scene, staying in Prague with her children. Her oldest son, Hynek, died from tuberculosis as a teenager. Since her husband was a government employee, as his legal wife, it was impossible for her to gain any form of employment, thus they often had no food or shelter. Eventually, she returned to her husband then died from cancer at the age of 41. The Bohemian patriots arranged a magnificent funeral for her. Her image is on the 500 CZK currency.