Harriet Augusta Dorothea Löwenhjelm grew up in an aristocratic family in Stockholm and attended the teaching college of reform educationalist Anna Sandström purely out of interest. After spending one year at a school for home economics, she studied at the art academy, which expelled her after her basic year. Her independence and temperament better suited the group of women wood engravers at Harriet Sundström’s studio, where Siri Derkert and Vera Nilsson also worked.
In 1913, she made a lithograph print of her work Konsten att älska och dess följder using her own etchings after the manuscript had been turned down by several publishers. She etched her poems into stone. This publication of fifty copies was the only one ever printed during her lifetime. She gave the manuscript for her first selection of poems to her friend Elsa Björkman, who ensured that they were printed in 1919. The bigger selection, Dikter, published in 1927, was widely read, and she became a leading poet. Her unpublished writing consists of diaries with vignettes, etchings, and drawings, manuscripts for books, letters, and poems. Harriet Löwenhjelm died of tuberculosis at a young age.
