The Swedish writer Hilma Angered-Strandberg offers something of an aesthetic manifesto. She wants her fiction to spring forth, both “from a desire to write in the moment of inspiration, and from a desire to be useful, to grasp people’s ears and force them to listen to all the things that are wrong and shameful out here”. The lines are written with reference to her breakthrough work Västerut (1887; Out West), which is a collection of short stories set in the Swedish west-coast province of Bohuslän. Throughout her life, Hilma Angered-Strandberg was possessed by a desire to write. Through bitter experience, she realised that if an author wants to depict life in a credible way, she must in her fiction allow herself the lack of order that is characteristic of life itself.
Tag: Letters
The Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson felt like “a pariah, a mangy dog”. Before she settled on the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren, she had long vacillated between the alternatives ‘Tardif’, the tardy, and ‘O. Twist’, the unwelcome. Her authorship is based on this conflict of identity. “I am a woman. But I am an author – am I not, then, something of a man as well?”, she wonders in 1888. Her own life was short and ended tragically.But for a period of a few years in the middle of the 1880s she was astonishingly productive. Her works spoke to the core of the morality controversy’s debate over female identity. Her intellectual vitality during this short period stands in contrast to the image of a sickly, doomed person, which has dominated her posthumous reputation.
Fredrika Bremer has won respect as a personality, as a letter writer, and as a writer of travel accounts. But as soon as it comes to her novels, reservations usually begin to make their appearance. The only exceptions made are usually for Grannarne (1837; Eng. tr. The Neighbours) and Hemmet (1839; Eng. tr. The Home). With these books, she became one of the world’s most read novelists. No Swedish author, not even Selma Lagerlöf, has enjoyed as much success in the English-speaking world. Few Swedish authors have been translated into so many languages.All of Fredrika Bremer’s production may be read in the light of a Realist and a Romantic code. On the one hand, she examines the woman’s position in society, her right to education and personal development. On the other hand, she is preoccupied with the right of the inner life as opposed to the outer life and with the possibilities for passion, the female heart, and the female fire to overturn the existing state of things. It is not balance that constitutes Fredrika Bremer’s originality. Rather, it is the very agitation in the books that captures the reader. She was a passionate being – both as an intellectual and in her search for freedom.
Approaching her forties, Thekla Knös published some poems that essentially conform to a cheerful, pious, and snug – homey – idealism. By her contemporaries she was regarded as a typical exponent of everyday culture. The contemporary literary critics commended Knös’s poems and saw in her lyric poetry a confirmation of the thesis that the ‘historical period of art’ had ended. This did not mean that the poem, or poetry, had had its day, but that it had been given a new function, namely to embellish everyday life.Accordingly, the field of poetry was opened up to the female poet as well. Her interest in children is striking. Not only does she write about children, she also writes for children, and her career as a female author is thus typical of the period. Unfortunately she vanished to the place where so many creative and frustrated women formerly ended their lives, the asylum.
Magdalena Sofia, ‘Malla’, Silfverstolpe hosted the most well-known learned salon in Sweden, frequented during the 1820s and 1830s by famous male authors of the time. Through her contact with these famous men Malla Silfverstolpe has gone down in history, whereas her own person and her individual contributions to the salon culture have been marginalised.Her great memoirs, published posthumously in four volumes, are at one and the same time the most important document about the Swedish salon culture and the most interesting literary text by a woman that has issued from this cultural milieu. This latter dimension has been neglected, and the work has primarily been highlighted as a historical source of knowledge about the period’s famous men. Yet, with her close examination of the conditions of emotion, she offers a unique insight into the contradictions of women’s lives and women’s culture in the early nineteenth century.