Emmy Arnold was born in 1883 in Riva, Latvia, to a prominent family of academics. As an adult she turned her back on the middle-class milieu of her upbringing and married Eberhard Arnold, a revolutionary public speaker. In 1920 the couple left their Berlin home and founded a rural commune that still exists in the Bruderhof, and as a Christian communal movement in the USA, UK and Australia. This is a biography and history of Emmy Arnold's life and work.