Born in Riga in 1884 as the daughter of the teacher Joseph Skalberg, Elfriede Eckardt-Skalberg died 1964 in Überlingen on Lake Constance.
After attending school in Riga and studying in Munich she became an editor of the Rigaische Rundschau, temporarily music teacher in Riga, then music and theatre critic until 1939. Since 1915 she was married to the journalist and writer Guido Hermann Eckardt, who published several novels. 

They moved to Germany in 1940, where Elfriede Eckardt-Skalberg worked as theatre critic for the Südkurier in Constance. From 1907 on she published several volumes of poetry, most recently "Casanova's Experiences in Sonnets" (Hamburg 1964) and translated Latvian prose and Latvian and Russian poetry like "Eugen Onegin" by Pushkin. In 1956 she received a recognition prize by the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste for her translations.