Born into a high-ranking family in Karlsruhe, Karoline von Günderode entered a Protestant convent in Frankfurt at age seventeen. She was free to receive guests, and through the jurist and author Friedrich Karl von Savigny she met the Romantic circle around Clemens Brentano. Brentano’s sister Bettina von Arnim became her friend; Arnim later published Die Günderode (1840), a collection of letters between them, which was partly translated by the American writer Margaret Fuller (1842).