Laura Karoline Graves

Laura Karoline Graves came from a smallholding in western Zealand and was a maid until she married in 1884. During her toilsome life as a farmer’s wife, she transcended the boundaries of social class when she started recording farming life in western Zealand for Dansk Folkemindesamling (the Danish Folklore Archives). As a writer, she had to struggle against both her husband and intellectuals. Thus, her description of the local countryside in Ved Halleby Aa, 1921, is very much altered and edited, while her own oral narrative style has greater free reign in her book of memoirs En Almuekvindes Liv, 1927.