Pauline Elisabeth Ottilie Luise of Wied, widely known by her literary name of Carmen Sylva, was born on December 29, 1843, in Neuwied, Duchy of Nassau.

She was the first Queen of Romania as the wife of King Carol I (1839-1914). They married in 1869, and their only child, a daughter Maria, died in 1874 at age three, an event from which Elisabeth never recovered. She was crowned Queen of Romania in 1881 after Romania was proclaimed a kingdom. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, also known as the Romanian War of Independence, she devoted herself to the care of the wounded and founded the Decoration of the Cross of Queen Elisabeth to reward distinguished service in such work. She fostered the higher education of women in Romania and established societies for various charitable objects. She was the 835th Dame of the Order of Queen Maria Luisa. She founded the National Society for the Blind and was the first royal patron of the Romanian Red Cross. Early distinguished by her excellence as a pianist, organist, and singer, she also showed considerable ability in painting and illuminating. Her lively poetic imagination led her to the path of literature, especially to poetry, folklore, and ballads. In addition to numerous original works, she put into literary form many of the legends current among the Romanian peasantry. As "Carmen Sylva", she wrote poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, and collections of aphorisms in German, Romanian, French, and English. In 1888, she received the Prix Botta, a prize awarded triennially by the Académie française, for her volume of prose aphorisms “Les Pensees d'une reine” (1882). The Bucharest-born colonizer of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, Julius Popper, was a fan of her work and named some features after her, e.g., Sierra Carmen Silva (Chile), Río Carmen Silva (Argentina, also known as Río Chico), and The Forest path of Carmen Sylva (Šetalište Carmen Sylve) in Opatija, Croatia.

She died on March 2, 1916, in Bucharest, Romania.