Ragnhild Goldschmidt was an author and a champion of women’s rights, was born and grew up in Copenhagen in a traditional Jewish family, and was the sister of the writer M. A. Goldschmidt. She never married, but supported herself by working as a tutor and housekeeper for her brother. She was a co-founder of Kvindelig Læseforening (women’s reading society), established in 1872, and ran it from 1881. Her novel En Kvindehistorie, published anonymously in 1875, is her one single published work, condescendingly labelled “ladies’ literature” by the critics, nonetheless a subtle expression of the battle of the transitional woman between irrepressible assertion of the self and resigned renunciation of the self.
