You Alone Are Real presents for the first time in English Lou Andreas-Salomé's memoir of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's lifelong friend, travelling companion and muse, Salomé vividly recalls their meetings and travels, the dam-bursts of creativity in which Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, and their long correspondence in which she kept Rilke from utter despair.

Written in 1927, a year after Rilke's death, You Alone Are Real to Me is the work of a fascinatingly multi-faceted woman, a popular European novelist, a friend to Nietzsche and Freud, a noted writer on psychoanalysis: above all, a woman capable of understanding the aspirations and spirit of her 'Old Rainer'.

'You Alone Are Real to Me is eloquent and superbly nuanced. Von der Lippe's introduction and afterword are critically splendid.' Harold Bloom