Luise Hensel (30 March 1798 to 18 December 1876) was a German teacher and religious poet, who influenced the romantic style of her friend and fellow poet, Clemens Brentano. Life Luise Hensel was the sister of Wilhelm Hensel and the sister-in-law of the composer Fanny Mendelssohn. She was born on March 30, 1798. Her father, Johann, was a Lutheran minister at Linum, a small town in the Margravate of Brandenburg, Kingdom of Prussia. After the death of her father, in 1809, Luise's mother with her son and three daughters returned to her hometown, Berlin. Luise attended the high school (Realschule), now the Elisabethschule, where she showed extraordinary talent. Around 1816, she met the poet Clemens Brentano, who called her "the angel in the wilderness". However, Hensel still influenced the romantic style of Brentano quite significantly; Brentano wrote the following to his brother in 1817: "These songs (referring to twenty songs sent to him by Hensel) at first broke my heart, causing me to burst into tears, their truth and simplicity striking me as the holiest that man could produce." Like Brentano, The composer Ludwig Berger, held an unrequited love for Hensel. Another author, Wilhelm Müller, was also unlucky in love with Hensel. The story of this unfulfilled love is recorded in two works composed by Franz Schubert, the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (English: The pretty mill-girl) and Winterreise (English: Winter Journey). The love of another man, casual friend Ludwig von Gerlach, who would later become a teacher of Otto von Bismarck, led to Hensel enjoying a high place within the Centre Party, a powerful political party in Germany at the time. This conflicted with her religious feelings, and on 8 December 1818, in the Hedwigskirche, Berlin she joined the Catholic Church. These circumstances weighed heavily on Hensel, and in 1819, she left Berlin. She entered into the service of Princess Mimi Salm-Reifferscheidt-Krautheim, traveling first to Münster, and eventually to Düsseldorf. In Münster, under the influence of religious teacher Bernhard Overberg, her convictions deepened. Later, on March 6, 1820, she took a vow of virginity. For a number of years, she was companion to the Princess Salm of Munster. In 1821, she took a job as a teacher for the widow of the poet Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg in the town of Sondermühlen, where she stayed until 1823. While there she came to the end of her religious development,