Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995 : Swedish Women's Writing, 1850-1995 [1 ed.] 9781847141972, 9780485910032

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Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995

Women in Context

Women's Writing 1850-1990s Series Editor: Janet Garton (University of East Anglia) This new series provides a survey, country by country, of women's writing from the beginnings of the major struggle for emancipation until the present day. While the main emphasis is on literature, the social, political and cultural development of each country provides a context for understanding the position and preoccupations of women writers. Modern critical currents are also taken into account in relating feminist criticism to recent critical theory. Already published Norwegian Women's Writing 1850-1990 Janet Garton 0 485 91001 2 hb 0 485 92001 8 pb Italian Women's Writing 1860-1994 Sharon Wood 0 485 91002 0 hb 0485920026 pb French Women's Writing 1850-1994 Diana Holmes 0 485 91004 7 hb 0 485 92004 2 pb In preparation German Women's Writing 1850-1995 Chris Weedon and Franziska Meyer 0 485 91005 5 hb 0 485 92005 0 pb

Women in Context

SWEDISH WOMEN'S WRITING 1850-1995 Helena Forsas-Scott

THE ATHOLONEPRESS LONDON&ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS,N

First published 1997 by THE ATHLONE PRESS 1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG and 165 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, NJ 07716 © Helena Forsas-Scott Published with the assistance of a grant from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 485 91003 9 hb 0 485 92003 4 pb Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forsas-Scott, Helena. Swedish women's writing, 1850-1995 / Helena Forsas-Scott. p. cm. — (Women in context) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-485-91003-9. - ISBN 0-485-92003-4 (pbk.) 1. Swedish literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Swedish literature—19th century—History and criticism. Women—Sweden—Social conditions. 3. Swedish literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Literature and society—Sweden. 5. Women—Sweden—Social conditions. I. Title. II. Series: Women in context (London, England) PT9315.F67 1997 839.709'9287-dc21 96-47339 CIP All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by Bibloset Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd

Till Mor och till minnet av Far

Forsas-Scott, Helena Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995 Department of Scandinavian Studies, University College London The Athlone Press, London, & Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997 360 pp.

Monograph ISBN Nos.: hardback: 0 485 91003 9 paperback: 0 485 92003 4 This study offers analyses of the oeuvres of a number of major Swedish women authors against the background of significant political, economic, and social developments, which are presented with special attention to the situation of women. The book is divided into three chronological sections, each of which contains a background chapter followed by three chapters analysing the work of individual writers in some depth: 1850-1919, with Fredrika Bremer, Selma Lagerlof, and Elin Wagner; 1919-1961, with Karin Boye, Moa Martinson, and Birgitta Trotzig; 1961-1995, with Sara Lidman, Kerstin Ekman and, in the final chapter, Sonja Akesson, Agneta Pleijel, and Mare Kandre. The analyses, which are text-centred, relate the oeuvres of these writers to the established canon and draw on a range of current feminist literary theories to highlight aspects such as gender and plot, the questioning of established boundaries and hierarchies, feminine creativity, and identity. The volume concludes with extensive bibliographies.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Series Foreword Introduction

PART I: 1850-1919 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

The Pioneers Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) Elin Wagner (1882-1949)

PART II: 1919-1961 Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

5 6 7 8

Consolidation Karin Boye (1900-1941) Moa Martinson (1890-1964) Birgitta Trotzig (born 1929)

viii ix xiii 1

9

11 34 52 70

89

91 113 131 149

PART III: 1961-1995

169

Notes Bibliography Index

259 293 315

Chapter 9 New Generations at the Forefront Chapter 10 Sara Lidman (born 1923) Chapter 11 Kerstin Ekman (born 1933) Chapter 12 Experimentation and Innovation Conclusions

171 197 216 236 255

List of Illustrations 1. Fredrika Bremer. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 2. Fredrika Bremer. Statue by Sigrid Fridman, 1928. The Royal Library, Stockholm. 3. Selma Lagerlof. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 4. Elin Wagner. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 5. Selma Lagerlof takes her entry in the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Dec. 1914. Idun, Jan. 1915. 6. Karin Boye. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 7. Moa Martinson. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 8. Birgitta Trotzig. Photograph by Ingemar Leckius. 9. Sara Lidman. Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm. 10. Kerstin Ekman. Photograph by Weine Lexius. 11. Sonja Akesson. 12. Agneta Pleijel. The Royal Library, Stockholm. 13. Mare Kandre. Photograph by Ulla Montan. 14. From Agneta Pleijel, Kollontaj, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 1979. Photograph by Beata Bergstrom. Drottningholms Teatermuseum, Stockholm.

Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank Janet Garton, the Series Editor, and Brian Southam of the Athlone Press. Friends and colleagues in Sweden have gone out of their way to support and help me. In particular, I would like to thank Sara Lidman for her encouraging response to an article of mine about her work, and Kerstin Ekman for her inspiring co-operation as I was editing, together with Sarah Death, the 1995 Supplement of Swedish Book Review. Barbro Ek of Bonniers Forlags Arkiv, Stockholm, Jane Rothlind of The Royal Library, Stockholm, and Karin Widegren of Drottningholms Teatermuseum have provided invaluable help with illustrations, as have Jarl Hammarberg, Ingemar Leckius, Weine Lexius and Ulla Montan. In Britain, Karin Petherick has, as always, been generous with her support. Joan Tate has kindly permitted me to use her previously unpublished translations of poems by Katarina Frostenson and Agneta Pleijel. Barbro Edwards and Edwina Simpson of the Cultural Section at the Swedish Embassy, London, have been unfailing in their efforts to find me up-to-date information. The final phase of my work has been greatly facilitated by the encouragement of my colleagues in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, University College London. The assistance of Alan Shaw of the Central Computing Services, University College London, has been invaluable. The staff of the many libraries in which I have worked have been unfailingly helpful: The British Library, London, and especially Tom Geddes, Head of the German and Scandinavian Section; Edinburgh University Library; Gothenburg University Library, including the invaluable Women's History Collections; The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; The Queen Mother Library, University of Aberdeen, and especially Margaret Coutts, Deputy Librarian up to 1994; The Royal Library, Stockholm; University College Library, London, and especially Bess Ryder of the Scandinavian Section. For grants which have greatly assisted me in my research I am

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indebted to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, London; Konung Gustav VI Adolfs Fond for svensk kultur, Stockholm; Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Stockholm; and the Dean's Fund, University College London. I would like to thank the Carnegie Fund for the Universities of Scotland for a grant to cover the cost of acquiring the illustrations, and the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, for a grant that allowed me to include these illustrations. I am indebted to Anders Clason, Cultural Counsellor at the Swedish Embassy, London, and the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation for covering the cost of copyright fees, and last but not least, to Humanistisk-Samhallsvetenskapliga Forskningsradet, Stockholm, for providing a publication grant. Sarah Death, Meopham, generously read my manuscript, which has benefited greatly from her comments. Linda Schenck, Gothenburg, read the chapter on Selma Lagerlof and made valuable observations. Janet Carton's readings of my text have resulted in much useful feedback. I am most grateful to all three readers; needless to say, I am responsible for the shortcomings that remain. I could not have written this book without the loyal support and encouragement of my husband, William Scott, and our son Allan. In Sweden my sister, Anna Forsas, has provided practical assistance; and along with my niece, Sofia Forsas, she has helped to ensure that Allan's spells in Sweden over the last few years have been as enjoyable as ever. My mother, Britta Forsas, has been endlessly generous with her help and patience; and although my father, Tage Forsas, died before I embarked on this project, his love of the arts remains an incomparable source of inspiration. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint copyright material: For Edith Sodergran, 'Vierge moderne' and 'Hope', tr. David McDuff: Reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd from: Complete Poems by Edith Sodergran (Bloodaxe Books, 1984). Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm, for permission to print extracts from poems by Karin Boye in English translation.

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Kerstin Ekman and Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm, for permission to print an extract from Knivkastarens kvinna in English translation. Kerstin Ekman, Rose-Marie Oster and Swedish Book Review for an extract from Knivkastarens kvinna, translated by Rose-Marie Oster. Katarina Frostenson, Wahlstrom & Widstrand, Stockholm, and Joan Tate for permission to print 'Du', translated by Joan Tate. Elsa Grave and Norstedts Forlag, Stockholm, for permission to print 'Overgivna' in English translation. Jarl Hammarberg, the heirs of Sonja Akesson and Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm, for permission to print extracts from poems by Sonja Akesson in English translation. Jarl Hammarberg, the heirs of Sonja Akesson, Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm, and University of Minnesota Press for an extract from 'Hur ser din fa'rg rott ut?', translated by Anselm Hollo, in Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo (eds), Modem Swedish Poetry in Translation (1979). Jarl Hammarberg, the heirs of Sonja Akesson, Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm, and Richard B. Vowles for an extract from' Aktenskapsfragan, I', translated by Richard B. Vowles. Kristina Lugn and Bonnier Alba, Stockholm for permission to print 'Fran vart lilla hus vid stranden' in English translation. Elisabeth M011er Jensen, editor of Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria, vol. Ill (Bra Bocker, Hoganas, forthcoming 1996), for permission to draw on my article on Elin Wagner for the present volume. Agneta Pleijel, Norstedts Forlag, Stockholm, and Joan Tate for permission to print extracts from poems by Agneta Pleijel, translated by Joan Tate. For permission to reproduce the illustrations I am indebted to the

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following: Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm (for the portraits of Fredrika Brerner, Karin Boye, Selma Lagerlof, Sara Lidman and Elin Wagner); Drottningholms Teatermuseum and Beata Bergstrom (for the photograph from Agneta Pleijel's Kollontaj); Jarl Hammarberg (for the portrait of Sonja Akesson); Ingemar Leckius (for the portrait of Birgitta Trotzig); Weine Lexius (for the portrait of Kerstin Ekman); Ulla Montan (for the portrait of Mare Kandre); the Royal Library, Stockholm (for the photograph of Sigrid Fridman's statue of Fredrika Bremer and for the portrait of Agneta Pleijel). Helena Forsas-Scott London and Aberdeen, July 1996

Series Foreword The aim of the Women in Context series is to present a countryby-country survey of women's writing from the beginnings of the struggle for emancipation until the present day. It will include not just feminist writers but women's writing in a more general sense, incorporating a study of those working independently of or even in direct opposition to the feminist aim of greater autonomy for women. While the principal emphasis is on literature and literary figures, they are placed in the context of the social, political and cultural development without which their position cannot be properly understood, and which helps to explain the differing rates of progress in different areas. The volumes therefore combine survey chapters, dealing with women's place in the public and private life of a given period, with more in-depth studies of key figures, in which attention will be focused on the texts. There is no attempt at encyclopaedic completeness, rather a highlighting of issues perceived as specifically relevant by women, and of writers who have influenced the course of events or made a significant contribution to the literature of their day. Wherever possible, parallels with other countries are drawn so that the works can be placed in an international perspective. Modern critical currents are also taken into account in relating feminist criticism to recent critical theory. Until quite recently women's writing has been virtually excluded from the literary canon in many countries; as a result there is often a dearth of information available in English, and an absence of good translations. Women in Context represents a move to remedy this situation by providing information in a way which does not assume previous knowledge of the language or the politics of the country concerned; all quotations are in English, and summaries of central texts are provided. The general reader or student of literature or women's studies will find the volumes a useful introduction to the field. For those interested in further research, there is a substantial

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bibliography of studies of women's writing in the country concerned and of individual authors, and of English translations available in modern editions. Janet Garton

Introduction Swedish literature, to the extent that it has made an impact in the English-speaking world over the past century and a half, has been epitomised by the name of August Strindberg, but in fact the names of women writers have predominated: around the middle of the nineteenth century, the novels of Fredrika Bremer achieved huge international fame; from about 1900, the reputation of Selma Lagerlof began to spread over the world, with new translations continuing to appear a century later; and since the end of the Second World War, Astrid Lindgren has established herself as an exceptionally successful author of books for children. These names, however, are likely to stand out in isolation; and although there has been a modest increase in the number of translations of works by contemporary Swedish women writers over the past few decades, a more coherent picture of Swedish women's writing and its development has been available only to those with a command of Swedish or another mainland Scandinavian language. The aim of this book is to help redress the balance by presenting the work of a number of major Swedish women writers in their specific context. Sweden has acquired a reputation for its far-reaching policies on equality, including equality between women and men. It is often forgotten, however, that these policies, along with the relative radicalism of Swedish Social Democracy, are comparatively recent phenomena. In a European perspective, Sweden by the mid-nineteenth century was a poor country with a predominantly agricultural economy, a small and rather insignificant middle class, and a solidly conservative establishment which, despite the extensive reform of the Swedish Parliament in 1865-66, remained in control well into this century. Fundamental democratic reforms such as the introduction of universal suffrage for men and parliamentarism were late in coming, in comparison with the rest of Scandinavia, and Sweden was the last of the Scandinavian countries to introduce universal suffrage for women, in 1919. The construction of the

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Swedish Women's Writing

modern welfare state effectively began only after the Second World War, and policies to promote gender equality mostly date from the late 1960s onwards. The early women's movement in Sweden gained considerable strength and evolved an elaborate organisation during the long struggle for female suffrage. The Swedish suffragists built up international links which helped to reinforce the challenge to the conservative national establishment. Interestingly, feminist radicalism continued to develop in Sweden throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The role during these decades of Tidevatvet (The Epoch), a radical women's weekly, and of the Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad, gave feminism a relative prominence at a time when its significance elsewhere in Scandinavia was waning quickly. On the other hand, second-wave feminism was slower to make an impact in Sweden than in any other Scandinavian country with the exception of Finland, partly because it had to some extent been anticipated by a national debate on gender roles, with new policies designed to promote gender equality already being put into place by the time second-wave feminism emerged. In a wider perspective, however, there can be little doubt that second-wave feminism has played a significant role in Sweden, not least as a source of inspiration for a number of the new women writers "who have made their mark since the early 1970s. The tradition of women's writing in Sweden is a rich and wide-ranging one, going back, in a chronology reaching far beyond the boundaries of the present volume, at least to St Bridget in the fourteenth century. The timespan with which we are concerned here begins with the emergence in Sweden of the realist novel, a project headed by women writers with Fredrika Bremer in the vanguard. Fredrika Bremer's many-faceted and increasingly radical examination of the condition of women was to become a major source of inspiration both for first-wave feminism in Sweden and for subsequent generations of women writers. The first phase of the Modern Breakthrough, which began in Sweden towards the end of the 1870s, is associated not only with the name of August Strindberg but also with that of Victoria Benedictsson, whose novels and short stories of the 1880s have recently been complemented by a complete edition of her extraordinary diary. The second phase of the Modern Breakthrough with its growing

Introduction

3

preoccupation with aestheticism is illustrated by the work of male poets such as Verner von Heidenstam and Gustaf Eroding and, of course, by the remarkable oeuvre of Selma Lagerlof which was to continue to develop into the 1930s. Selma Lagerlof s novels and short stories have consistently had a wide popular appeal, but their complexity and sophistication have only begun to come to light as the result of scholarly work from the 1950s onwards. The final phase of the Modern Breakthrough with its return to a socially committed realism counts Elin Wagner as its leading woman representative. It is thanks to her that the women's suffrage movement has been chronicled in Swedish literature. In her later novels the radicalism becomes increasingly far-reaching, drawing, notably, on elaborate mythical structures. Modernism in Swedish-language literature was headed by a woman writer, the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Sodergran, whose texts foregrounding a distinctly feminine consciousness have exerted an immeasurable influence on twentieth-century Swedish literature. Among the early modernists in Sweden were Par Lagerkvist, a playwright and novelist as well as a poet, and Gunnar Ekelof and Karin Boye, both of whom were inspired by the work of Edith Sodergran. Karin Boye published novels as well as poetry, with some of her novels clearly being significant sites of modernist experimentation, while her poetry formulates a feminine multiplicity of increasing complexity. In the 1930s, a period marking a wider acceptance of literary modernism in Sweden, the so-called proletarian writers also emerged. Male novelists such as Ivar Lo-Johansson and Harry Martinson were joined by Moa Martinson, who gradually established herself as one of Sweden's most popular writers this century. In her early novels in particular, realism can be seen to combine with modernist ambitions. Stina Aronson, her contemporary, made a more emphatic transition from realism to modernism resulting in some powerfully original texts. Birgitta Trotzig, who represents a later generation and is inspired by a strong religious conviction, also belongs among the modernists, her sparse and poetic prose texts drawing on subtle psychological explorations to pinpoint wider ethical issues. The political commitment that characterised Swedish literature from the mid-60s to the mid-70s was followed by an emphatic return to fiction. While male writers like Jan Myrdal and Goran

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Swedish Women's Writing

Palm were leading contributors to the documentary genre that flourished in the 1960s, and Sven Delblanc and Lars Gustafsson both marked the return to fiction with multi-volume novels, the oeuvre of Sara Lidman neatly encapsulates both trends. Her political texts of the 1960s, which followed a handful of original psychological novels, drew on experiences from Africa and North Vietnam which subsequently opened up critical perspectives on Swedish society too. Sara Lidman's return to the novel, in 1977, also resulted in a multi-volume work, the political critique transposed into a boldly expansive plot and a poetic prose combining an astonishing range of registers. While the impact of second-wave feminism on Swedish literature, at least in immediate terms, was relatively limited, a poet like Son] a Akesson, who used everyday language to develop existential issues in a familiar social context, gradually came to be associated with the new women's movement. It clearly also influenced a writer like Kerstin Ekman, whose multi-volume novel is at once a history of the contribution of women to the development of Swedish society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and an exploration of the literary unfolding of feminine consciousness. The range and innovation of her subsequent work have confirmed her position as one of the most significant writers working in Sweden today. The early work of Agneta Pleijel was rooted in the explicit political commitment of the 1960s, but her later output of plays, poetry and novels has tended to revolve around existential and metafictional issues with her most recent texts being distinctly postmodernist projects. In the mid-1990s, postmodernist experimentation and psychological exploration constitute major — and sometimes intertwining — strands in Swedish literature, with writers like Stig Larsson and Lars Noren standing out as two leading male representatives. Of particular interest in the context of this study is the wealth of work by new women writers, with poets such as Eva Strom, Ann Jaderlund and Katarina Frostenson bringing their awareness of gender to bear on far-reaching examinations of language and meaning. The texts of Mare Kandre tend to have a psychological focus which, in her most recent work, combines with a liberating lack of respect for patriarchal structures. There is, in other words, an abundance of writing by women in Sweden, and the subsequent chapters will provide more detailed analyses of the work of a number of women writers mentioned

Introduction

5

above. For feminist literary criticism, which emerged in Sweden in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is obviously a wonderfully rich field to explore, and in many respects the task has only begun.1 While the early work was much inspired by Anglo-American feminist criticism and notably Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, the influence of French feminist criticism, drawing on psychoanalysis arid linguistics, soon became prominent. A number of significant studies have been published, with the work of Fredrika Bremer and Selma Lagerlof attracting considerable attention and the contributions of women writers of the 1930s having been mapped out in some detail thanks to several major studies. So far, however, there have been relatively few studies of more recent writers, with the books to date including a study of Sonja Akesson and a doctoral thesis about Kerstin Ekman. Margaretha Fahlgren's feminist study of the work of August Strindberg (1994) represents an interesting development.2 However, despite the number of significant feminist studies over the past decade and a half, the academic attitude to feminist literary criticism in Sweden has been rather more hesitant than in the rest of Scandinavia or in Britain. While a five-volume history of twentieth-century Danish literature treating the work of male and female writers on an equal basis was published in the early 1980s,3 and a history of Norwegian women's writing in three volumes appeared towards the end of the decade,4 Sweden as yet can show no equivalents. The seven-volume history of Swedish literature, edited by leading male academics, that was published between 1987 and 1990, still marginalises women writers and their work,5 and the same is true of the most recent English-language survey of Swedish literature, Ingemar Algulin's A History of Swedish Literature (1989). It has taken a pan-Scandinavian project, Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (History of Writing by Women in Scandinavia), the first two volumes of which appeared in 1993, to begin to highlight the contributions of Swedish women writers.6 While Fredrika Bremer and Selma Lagerlof have been extensively translated into English, these translations now tend to be rather old, and in some cases they are also unreliable. Translations date relatively quickly, and for this and other reasons the appearance, in the last few years, of new translations of two novels by these authors

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has been particularly welcome: a translation of Selma Lagerlof s The Lowenskold Ring was published in 1991, and 1995 saw the publication of a translation of Fredrika Bremer's The Colonel's Family (Famillen H***). Prior to the last few decades, however, and with Fredrika Brerner, Selma Lagerlof and later Astrid Lindgren as the exceptions, there were only sporadic instances of works by Swedish women writers published in English translation, with the subsequent improvement due to more generous forms of support by the Swedish authorities. Thus Selma Lagerlof s Gosta Berling's Saga appeared in a new translation in 1962, Sara Lidman's The Rain Bird (Regnspiran) was published in the following year, and Karin Boye's Kallocain appeared in English in 1966. Manrape (Man kan inte vdldtas) by the Finland-Swedish author Marta Tikkanen was published in 1978, followed six years later by her Love Story of the Century (Arhundradets kdrlekssaga). Edith Sodergran, another Finland-Swedish writer, had her Complete Poems published in English in 1982. The international interest in the work of Marta Tikkanen was directly related to second-wave feminism which would also seem to have inspired the publication, in 1985, of Moa Martinson's Women and Apple Trees (Kvinnor och dppeltrdd). Poems and short stories by Swedish women writers have appeared in various anthologies, including a few focusing specifically on the work of women, but while there are English-language collections of texts by Danish and Norwegian women writers respectively, there is no equivalent collection of work by Swedish women writers. The number of individual works appearing in English translation is increasing, however: Sara Lidman's novel Naboth's Stone (Nabots sten) was published in 1989; Agneta Pleijel's novel The Dog Star (Hundstjarnari) in 1991, her play Summer Nights (Sommarkvdllar pa jorden) the following year; and Karin Boye's Complete Poems in 1994. Kerstin Ekman's Blackwater (Hdndelser vid vatten] appeared in 1995 and was shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Award; and as I write another three works by Kerstin Ekman are in the process of being translated into English. The major chronological divisions that structure the present study reflect central developments regarding the women's movements and the position of women in Sweden. Part I covers the period up to the granting of women's suffrage in 1919; Part II deals

Introduction

7

with the four decades up to the early 1960s, when the gender role debate was initiated; and Part III covers the period since 1961, including second-wave feminism and its impact. The authors on whose work I have chosen to focus are all significant figures in Swedish literature. While there can be no argument about the pioneering role of Fredrika Bremer, the chronology of her oeuvre has meant that I have covered, in her case, a number of texts dating from before 1850, also paying some attention to the work of other women novelists of the time. Most of the writers whose work I have analysed in detail are indeed novelists, but I have made some attempt to ensure that other genres are represented too, with Karin Boye and Sonja Akesson being major poets, and Agneta Pleijel a successful dramatist. Most of the chapters on individual authors begin with a survey of the critical stature of their work, followed by a summary of biographical details, central ideas, and so on. My analyses of the texts of these authors tend to focus on major themes, with individual works being approached in the context of what I perceive as overarching developments. I have drawn on feminist literary theory of different types, guided by my notions of the demands of the texts. My hope is that my analyses of the works of these women writers, in relation to details about their biographical backgrounds and the unfolding historical context, will help to bring out the strong tradition of women's writing in Sweden and, occasionally, shed new light on some of the many original and exciting texts with which it has been such a challenge and pleasure to work. For those readers who want to explore matters further, there are detailed bibliographies towards the end of this volume.

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PARTI 1850-1919

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1

The Pioneers WHEN THE THREAD OF LIFE WAS SPUN ONLY SLOWLY

In Sweden, it is a woman writer who introduces the realist novel and who also writes the text that subsequently becomes pivotal to the emerging middle-class women's movement. Fredrika Bremer's novel Hertha and its eponymous heroine appeared in 1856 and has traditionally been regarded as precipitating the improvement in the legal status of single women introduced two years later. The association founded in 1884 to work for better legal and economic conditions for middle-class women was named Fredrika Bremer-Forbundet (The Fredrika Bremer Association), and by 1913 its journal had been retitled Hertha. Fredrika Bremer, however, had published her first significant work as early as 1830—31, and Hertha needs to be approached in the context of an oeuvre that consistently puts the spotlight on the situation of women. Nor was Fredrika Bremer alone: in the 1830s and 1840s there "were at least another two women novelists of importance who helped to make the new realist novel a distinctly female enterprise in Sweden. But before we turn to this significant development in nineteenth-century Swedish literature — going back, in the process, a couple of decades before 1850 — it is necessary to sketch in the economic, political and social background, with special emphasis on the situation of women. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Sweden remained one of the most backward and least developed countries in Europe. Twice the size of Britain, Sweden had a population of about 3.4 million (Britain by 1850 had 20.8 million), 90 per cent of which lived in the rural areas, where a sizeable proletariat had emerged during the first half of the century. The economy was based on agriculture; and although the country produced iron and timber, there was very little industry. The towns were mostly very small, with Stockholm, the capital, having a population of 93,000 by

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1850; London at this time had 2.6 million. The population increase in combination with a decline in the marriage rate had resulted in growing numbers of single women, and with the country throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century being 'one of the most markedly patriarchal societies in Europe',1 these women often faced extreme problems. Foreign travellers were scandalised by the illegitimacy rates in Stockholm: it has been calculated that by 1845, nearly 50 per cent of the children in the capital were born out of wedlock.2 With the exception of widows, women lacked legal independence; and the all-pervasive influence of the established Lutheran Church reinforced their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Only a very small proportion of the Swedish population had any political influence, and in the mid-nineteenth century women, obviously, still had none at all. Liberal ideas, originating in Britain, had emerged in Sweden in the 1820s, but the relative insignificance of the urban middle class meant that these ideas had gained ground only slowly. Swedish political thinking was nationally focused and inward-looking, the country which, in the seventeenth century, had been one of the great powers of Europe, having finally lost Finland to Russia in 1809. The uneasy union with Norway, established in 1814, in many respects had helped to reinforce the conservatism of the Swedish establishment. It was Fredrika Bremer who pointed out, with reference to the humble Swedish contribution to the Great Exhibition in 1851, that 'The thread of life [. . .] is spun more slowly in Sweden than elsewhere on earth'.3 Yet behind the old-fashioned facade, a series of developments was effectively establishing the foundations of modern Sweden. With the industrialisation of Sweden being closely linked to the world economy, the boom years of the 1850s turned out to be the first in a series of decisive periods. Assisted by an improvement in communications, increasing quantities of raw materials were exported along with an early industrial product, the safety match, invented in Sweden in the 1840s. At the same time farming, which was to remain the basis of the economy throughout the nineteenth century, was undergoing major changes, with the clearing of land adding to the acreage of arable land, and better farming methods and more modern machinery boosting production still further.

The Pioneers

13

Economic pressures gradually contributed to improving the position of women. While daughters in rural Sweden had traditionally inherited only half as much as had sons, a law introduced in 1845 made sisters and brothers equals in this respect. The dissolution of the old guilds in 1846 enabled single women to support themselves by means of a trade, an opportunity previously available only to widows. And in the late 1850s a new profession was opened up as women gained permission to teach in the elementary school which had been introduced by the Education Act of 1842; indeed, women teachers, commanding lower rates of pay than their male colleagues, came to be seen as indispensable to the success of the elementary school system.4 Education for girls beyond the elementary stages was provided by private girls' schools, many of which were founded in the 1830s, 1850s and 1860s;5 and in 1861 the Women Teachers' College of Higher Education was set up to train the teachers required in the girls' schools. In 1870 women gained the right to sit the final school examinations, studentexamen, which gave access to higher education; and in 1873 women were given permission to sit the examinations in all academic faculties with the exception of theology and certain examinations in the Faculty of Law. The British controversy surrounding women's right to study medicine thus had no equivalent in Sweden - although the first Swedish woman to qualify as a doctor, Karolina Widerstrom, did not do so until 1896. The gradual improvement in the legal position of women can also be explained largely in terms of economic pressures. The reform of 1858 granted legal independence to single women above the age of 25 provided that they had made an application to a court of law. But not until 1884 did single women become the equals of men in this respect, gaining their legal independence automatically at the age of 21. Married women remained under the guardianship of their husbands until well into the twentieth century. However, an Association for Married Women's Property Rights was formed in 1873, the issue having been taken up by Tidskriftfor hemmet (The Home Journal), founded in 1858 and the first women's journal in Sweden to advocate emancipation. Thus a measure of ideological underpinning can be discerned alongside the more conspicuous financial rationale for reform in this area.

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Swedish Women's Writing

EARLY WOMEN WRITERS

The emergence of the work of women novelists from the 1830s onwards was an integral part of the new prominence of the middle class on the Swedish cultural scene. The modern newspaper press had begun to develop in the 1830s, spearheaded by Aftonbladet which acted as a focal point for the emergent liberal ideas and attracted significant writers, including the country's first woman journalist, Wendela Hebbe (1808-99). New publishing ventures resulted in a huge bpost for the novel, and foreign works in Swedish translation were soon replaced by the texts of native writers. Journals aimed at a wide audience began to flourish from the 1850s onwards. Dominated as it was by women writers, the Swedish novel of the 1830s and 1840s focused on women's experience and women's culture.6 This was in sharp contrast to the male-dominated writing of the Romantic period — although recent research has pointed to the efforts of female Romantic poets such as Eleonora Charlotta d'Albedyhll (1770-1835) and Julia Christina Nyberg (1785-1854) to subvert both the highly conventional concept of woman in the works of the male Romantics and the androcentrism characteristic of their interpretation of ancient Scandinavian myths.7 There is a clearer connection between the novelists of the 1830s and 1840s and the Swedish women writers of the second half of the eighteenth century. Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht (1718—1763) had challenged Rousseau's view of women in her 'Fruentimrets forsvar' ('The Defence of Woman', 1761) and had refined the poetic conventions of the time to convey both moral reflection and profoundly personal emotion. Anna-Maria Lenngren (1754—1817) excelled in the elegant satires appreciated by the readers of Stockholms Posten, a publication originally in tune with the radicalism of the French Revolution. Satire and irony also pervade her poetry, which combines gracefulness of form with a sharp and merciless eye for realistic detail. One of her more famous pieces is her poem offering tongue-in-cheek advice to a new generation of women, 'Nagra ord till min k. dotter' ('A Few Words to My Dear Daughter'), whose subtle ironies had to wait to be unravelled by present-day feminist critics.8 The position of the novel as the genre favoured by women writers is confirmed by the controversy sparked off by Carl Jonas

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Love Almqvist's Det gar an (Sara Videbeck, 1839), a text which advocated a free and equal relationship between man and woman in preference to marriage and which resulted in several replies by women writers, the majority opting for the genre of the novel.9 The novelist Sophie von Knorring (1797—1848) preferred less explicitly controversial topics; but her major texts, all dating from the 1830s, testify to the new significance of women's experience as a literary topic. Sophie von Knorring's style is characterised by a display of allusions to and quotations from other literary texts, many of them foreign, and a relatively sparing use of dialogue. In comparison with the work of her major Swedish contemporaries, Emilie Flygare-Carlen and Fredrika Bremer, the novels of Sophie von Knorring are more extensively coloured by Romanticism. Yet beneath this surface there is a perceptive attention to psychology, and the discussion of the situation of women, albeit confined to upper-class milieux, is both bold and potentially far-reaching. In both Sophie von Knorring's major novels, Cousinerna (The Cousins, 1834), and IHusionerna (The Illusions, 1836), the relationships between women and men constitute the central theme. Young Amalia in The Cousins is persuaded by her sick father to marry an older man who is a major in the Swedish army, but her heart remains with her cousin Axel, the Romantic and controversial hero of the narrative. In this conflict between common sense and emotion, the actions of the characters turn out to be surprisingly insignificant and uninformative; but there can be no mistaking the strength of feeling which unites Amalia and Axel, and that finds its most explicit expression in the duets they sing. In the last analysis the ideal which Axel celebrates in Amalia, that of the woman capable of controlling her feelings and accepting a life of self-denial, turns out to be unsustainable as the heroine falls ill and dies. While her plight has been the product of the male-dominated system of which she has been part, it has permitted a remarkably detailed exploration of female desire, and it is in this latter respect that Sophie von Knorring's book breaks new ground. The Illusions expands the theme of the relationship between woman and man within the framework of a more refined treatment of narrative form. The fictitious author of this first-person

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narrative, Ottilia, is only in her teens when she meets Otto. Their relationship develops, with Ottilia preferring to ignore Otto's double standards to the point where she perceives him as a partner in perfect love. But soon enough her illusions are shattered, and towards the end of her narrative she is preparing for death. Much of the critical edge of this text derives from the framework of the narrative, with the fictitious editor being none other than Otto himself, who is having Ottilia's manuscript published in the hope of solving his financial difficulties. The character of Otto and his shameless exploitation of Ottilia's tragic fate thus combine with her narrative, in which initial innocence is overlaid by painful experience, to focus on some pertinent yet largely implicit questions about the situation of women. Unlike Sophie von Knorring, who published her works anonymously, Emilie Flygare-Carlen (1807—1892) published in her own name. Even more widely translated than Sophie von Knorring, she also became one of the best paid writers in Scandinavia at the time.10 She came from Bohuslan, north of Gothenburg, and introduced into Swedish literature this rugged coastline complete with smugglers, customs officials, merchants, ship-wrecked sailors and a host of ordinary local people. Although the influence of the Gothic novel is prominent, especially in Emilie Flygare-Carlen's early texts, the west coast setting of her major novels forms the basis of an uncompromising realism, with the author claiming to have made the transition from Romanticism to truth.11 The setting also turns out to have significant implications for the depiction of women, with Emilie Flygare-Carlen's central female characters emerging as considerably more modern in their attitudes and preoccupations than those of Sophie von Knorring. In Rosen pa Tistelon (The Rose of Tistelon, 1842), Emilie FlygareCarlen's best-known novel, the untamed qualities of the setting are enhanced by conspicuous elements of the Gothic to achieve their focus in one of the central female characters. Gabriella, brought up on the outlying Thistle Island in a family of smugglers, is of a piece with her background and milieu, her anarchic streak suggesting female desire that cannot be conveyed in more explicit terms. Her stepmother, by contrast, turns Gabriella's father into a law-abiding and useful citizen, but the effect of this process is ultimately seen to be transient. Overshadowing the narrative are the ruthless killings

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of a customs official and his men once committed by Gabriella's father and grandfather; and when Gabriella eventually turns down both the son of the customs official and her other suitor, she asserts that anarchic independence which is subsequently confirmed by her act of setting fire to the family home in which representatives of the law have detained her father and grandfather. Known as 'The Rose of Thistle Island', Gabriella retains in her character a wildness which the narrative, provocatively, makes no real effort to civilise. Ett kopmanshus i skdrgdrden (A Merchant Family in the Archipelago, 1860—61) depicts women in more consistently constructive roles. In a setting handled with notable expertise, from the account of a shipwreck to the descriptions of local people and the rendering of their dialect, women emerge as central figures, inspired by the circumstances into working as the equals of men. Recently married to Ake, who is setting up as a merchant in the islands, Emilia is having to find her feet in her new environment. She is assisted by two local women: Majken, who discusses trade with the men over cigars and punch but who is also deeply in love with an aspiring customs official, and Thorborg, who combines a knowledge of medicine and a profound sensitivity towards her fellow human beings with utter fearlessness. Here the wild element, represented by the persecution instigated by Ake's jealous and dishonest business partner, is successfully quenched by the concerted efforts of the women. The narrative culminates in a powerful affirmation of marriage as a union between two equals, with Majken and her fiance replicating the model of Emilia with her newly won self-respect and her Ake. The novels of Fredrika Bremer, exploiting the framework of the family novel, focus more explicitly on the situation of women than do the texts of contemporaries such as Sophie von Knorring and Emilie Flygare-Carlen. And in the works of Fredrika Bremer, this preoccupation is underpinned by a coherent and radical intellectual conviction originating in the author's Christian faith. To Fredrika Bremer the novel is far more than a medium of entertainment: her choice of the genre is rooted in her religious belief, and her use of it serves to formulate complex social and ethical issues. In the process, she develops the form of the novel to a level of refinement unequalled by any of her contemporaries (see Chapter 2).

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POLITICS AND THE PEOPLE

In 1862, new legislation radically redesigned the Swedish system of local government. The reform was important to women in that it granted those who were tax-payers the right to vote in local elections — at a time when women's right to vote in national elections was still more than half a century away. The reform also paved the way for the transformation of the Swedish Parliament, the riksdag: in 1865—66 the four estates were replaced by two chambers. The reform appeared to be a victory for the middle class;12 but the aristocracy continued to predominate in the First Chamber, and with a big proportion of legally independent male citizens failing to reach the level of income or property required to vote in the elections to the Second Chamber, the system remained far from democratic. The absence of universal suffrage for men along with the country's economic backwardness have been pinpointed as the major reasons for the large-scale emigration from Sweden to the United States that got under way in the 1860s and only came to an end with the Depression around 1930.13 In all, about one million Swedes left their country, and it has been estimated that by 1910, one Swede in every five was living in the United States.14 If emigration is viewed as an individual protest against conditions in Sweden, the rise of popular movements such as the temperance movement, the free church, the Social Democratic Party, and the organisation of labour, can be seen as attempts to tackle these problems at home, and to do so on a collective basis.15 For 'Common to all the popular movements was a desire to rouse people, to organise and transform them and to change their way of life'; indeed, the policies of social reformation and social education which were to become such a distinctive feature of the development of modern Sweden have been perceived as having their roots in the tradition of the popular movements.16 The growth of these movements should of course be seen in the context of the break-up of traditional village and family structures. While both the temperance movement and the free church movement in Sweden can be traced back to well before 1850, even if the more significant activity began in the 1870s and 1860s respectively, the labour movement experienced a late breakthrough as a result of the slow industrialisation of the

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country in combination with the fact that much of the industry that did exist was scattered in rural areas. On the other hand, the absence of a strong liberal tradition in Swedish politics gave the labour movement considerable scope.17 The first Swedish trades union was the Trade Union of Printers, formed in 1886; and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, Landsorganisationen, was established in 1898. By 1900, one worker in five was a member of a union,18 a low figure in the light of subsequent developments in the country. Socialism was introduced in Sweden in 1881 by August Palm. Four years later he founded a newspaper, Sodal-Demokraten; and the Swedish Social Democratic Party was established in 1889, becoming the country's first modern political party. Reformist rather than revolutionary, the Swedish Social Democratic Party has been characterised by its close links with the trade union movement. With the possible exception of the temperance movement, these popular movements did little to attract women, the Social Democratic Party remaining patriarchal in its organisation and refusing to acknowledge the existence of separate women's issues until well into the twentieth century.19 Women, however, had begun to form trades unions in the 1880s, the pioneers being glove-makers and midwives; and Stockholms allmanna kvinnoklubb (The Stockholm Public Women's Club) was established in 1892 to publicise women's political issues. More middle-class women's organisations had been emerging throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Among the earliest were charitable organisations such as Stockholms fruntimmersforening for barnavdrd (The Stockholm Women's Association for Childcare), started in 1853 by Fredrika Bremer. When Centralfo'rbundet for sodalt arbete (The Central Federation for Social Work) was founded in 1903, it became the focal point for a range of women's charitable organisations and was also to provide models for much of the social care that is nowadays the responsibility of official bodies.20 A Swedish branch of The Federation for the Abolition of Regulated Prostitution was formed in 1878, three years after Josephine Butler had begun her campaign in Britain. And the Fredrika Bremer Association, founded in 1884, was to become an important focus for women's issues for nearly a century, its journal Dagny offering for much of the

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1880s and 1890s a significant public space for new women writers who were encouraged by its influential editor, Sophie Adlersparre (1823-95). THE MODERN BREAKTHROUGH: THE FIRST PHASE When the Danish critic Georg Brandes called, in the early 1870s, for a new literature that would 'submit problems to debate', a series of social and cultural changes had contributed to preparing his audience and alerting both writers and readers to the range of problems crying out for debate. An era of unflinching realism and Zolaesque naturalism, of science and positivism in place of the traditional Christian faith, and of frank analyses in drama and prose of aspects of politics and economy, of class, marriage and sexuality, the Modern Breakthrough achieved a pan-Scandinavian cultural transformation and was also the period when Scandinavian literature achieved an international breakthrough on a broad front. It has been argued that Georg Brandes's call for truthfulness had a special appeal to women writers, who were perceiving the condition of women as constructed by deceit and lies.21 Swedish women writers were clearly inspired by the discussions of marriage and the situation of women in the works of Henrik Ibsen and Bj0mstjerne Bj0rnson in Norway, with the predominance of women playwrights in Sweden in the first half of the 1880s indicating the role of this specific influence. Sweden's August Strindberg (1849-1912) had demonstrated an early commitment to women's emancipation, as illustrated by his first major drama, Master Olof (Master Olof, 1872). But his work from the 1880s onwards shows a decisive shift, and there can be no mistaking the misogyny informing characters such as Laura in Fadren (The Father, 1887), who successfully plots to have her husband declared insane, or Maria in En dares forsvarstal (A Madman's Defence, written in 1887-88 and first published, in German, in 1893), whose increasingly contradictory nature and moral degeneracy are depicted as pivotal to the collapse of her marriage to Axel, the first-person narrator. In a recent study, Margaretha Fahlgren has highlighted the transition to a more moderate concept of woman in August Strindberg's works from about 1900 onwards with woman emerging as a tool for man's reconciliation with life, taking Indra's Daughter in Ett drdmspel (A Dream Play, 1901) as a case in point.

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But as Margaretha Fahlgren emphasises, this transition in no way bridges the gulf between the sexes in August Strindberg's works: the reconciliation with life is explicitly the concern of man, and woman remains subordinate, defined and perceived in relation to the male norm.22 The controversial images of women in August Strindberg's naturalistic work came slightly late to have much impact on the work of contemporary women writers; eventually it was Elin Wagner, belonging to a later generation, who took up the challenge in the 1910s (see Chapter 4). To writers of the Modern Breakthrough such as Alfhild Agrell (1849-1923) and Anne-Charlotte LefHer (1849-1892), the work of Henrik Ibsen and Bj0rnstjerne Bj0mson was clearly more central. Alfhild Agrell enjoyed some successful years as a playwright in the first half of the 1880s. Thus her play Rdddad (Saved, 1882) received 26 performances at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, between 1882 and 1884, at a time when plays by August Strindberg rarely ran to more than 10 performances.23 In Alfhild AgrelTs plays the dialogue is swift, often sharp and frequently witty; and dramatic situations are constructed and combined with a notable feeling for scenic effect. The recurring theme is the demand for truth: in all her major plays male double standards are exposed by strong, outspoken women. In Saved, echoes of Ibsen's Et Dukkehjem (A Doll's House, 1879) combine with a rather more wide-ranging and ruthless portrayal of the situation of the married woman. Viola has been married for five years and the couple has a young son, but her husband is a bon viveur who has not only squandered his wife's assets of which he gained control when they married, but who is now seeking her help to cover up an embezzlement. The moral double standards are shown to destroy the family, with the attitude of an older generation of women having a particularly pernicious effect. When Viola leaves her husband, she is carrying her dead son in her arms; but the element of melodrama cannot obscure the significance of her assertion of independence. In Db'md (Condemned, 1884), the moral double standards are exposed by an engagement: the Captain who has just become the fiance of the daughter of a professor turns out to have had a long-lasting relationship, which has resulted in a child, with the

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family's governess, and to have promised to marry her. Now he explains to her that 'a man has all the right in the world to make himself dirty with his right hand, provided that he washes himself clean with his left one'.24 When the governess boldly makes the matter public, she encounters fearful silence and finds support only with the younger generation. Much of the public embarrassment surrounding the governess in Condemned stems from her acknowledgement of female desire, an issue which is also at the forefront in Ensam (Alone, 1886), a play about a single mother. Thora's absolute adherence to truth, her sole guide in the bringing up of her daughter, is confronted with society's preference for cynical compromise as her daughter's prospective father-in-law attempts to construct for her a background conforming to the prevailing moral standards. Thora exposes the hollowness of these standards: 'If, she asks, 'it is an honour to be my child's father, how, then, can it be a disgrace to be her mother?';25 and the isolation facing her as the play draws to a close becomes a measure of the moral falsity pervading this society. While Alfhild Agrell was unable to adapt to the shift in the literature of the second half of the 1880s away from contemporary social problems, Anne-Charlotte Leffler26 had demonstrated a greater artistic assurance and produced a highly promising range of work, short stories and novels as well as plays, by the time of her early death in 1892. Her texts have a notable formal elegance, and their scrutiny of the situation of women is remarkable both for its many-sidedness and its boldness. A recurring theme is the role of freedom, with many of Anne-Charlotte Leffler's central female characters not only striving for freedom but extensively testing out its significance and implications. One group of texts by Anne-Charlotte Leffler sets out the demand for freedom in specific social and economic contexts. Her play Sanna kvinnor (True Women, 1883)27 attacks moral double standards in terms that are strongly reminiscent of Alfhild Agrell's Saved from the previous year: again, a husband and father is turning to his wife for further financial support for his dissipated lifestyle. Anne-Charlotte Leffler adds to the urgency of the issue by placing the married eldest daughter in the same predicament as her mother; but it is the psychological complexity, with emotional bonds

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criss-crossing the gender divide, that makes this such a rewarding play.28 Hur mangorgodt (Doing Good, 1885) is a drama placing the lack of freedom in a broader social context, its realistic depiction of working-class life contrasting with the hypocrisy pervading the behaviour of the upper class. Anne-Charlotte Leffler also explored the woman artist's absolute demand for freedom. An early play, Skddespelerskan (The Actress, 1873), sets the traditional role of the married woman against the unfolding career of a young actress, with Elvira eventually turning down her suitor for the sake of her art. In the novel En sommarsaga (A Summer Tale, 1886), the situation of the woman artist is complicated by marriage, children, and the influence of a loving husband. In an exploration of a married relationship that achieves an impressive psychological depth, the text unveils a reciprocity of needs and demands and shows the woman artist to be trapped, the fulfilment of her roles set to remain no more than partial. Anne-Charlotte Leffler's boldest work investigates female eroticism and women's potential for realising their sexuality. The title of the novel Kvinnlighet och erotik (Femininity and Eroticism, 1883, 1890) pinpoints the contrast between a traditional, largely Victorian notion of femininity on the one hand and the need for freedom to acknowledge and explore female eroticism on the other. The plot is simple enough: Alie, a strong and independent woman, accompanies a married woman friend whose state of health is necessitating a stay in Italy, and once by the Mediterranean, Alie falls in love with an Italian nobleman. In a text where the conventional marital relationship of Alie's friend forms the backdrop and a wintry and confined Sweden is contrasted with a luxuriant Italy of endless possibilities, Anne-Charlotte Leffler makes use of the southern country and its culture to create a landscape of sensuality with Alie and her lover as the focal point. It is this perfectly controlled obliquity in the account of female sexuality that is the main strength of the work, along with the convincing depiction of character and the modern perspective on the central love relationship. In the work of Victoria Benedictsson (1850-1888), female desire is a more consistent but also a more problematic element. Along with August Strindberg, Victoria Benedictsson is the foremost representative of the early phase of the Modern Breakthrough in

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Swedish literature. Testifying to her motto 'Sanning och arbete' (Truth and work), her texts are fuelled by remarkable powers of observation which, in combination with an acute sensibility and an ear for the impact of the strong, unadorned phrase, have contributed to the lasting relevance and urgency of her work. Her oeuvre, which includes short stories, two novels, some plays, and a unique diary, had sprung from difficult personal circumstances: denied the opportunity to become an artist Victoria Benedictsson, at the age of 21, had married a widower more than twice her age with five children and settled in a small rural community in the south of the country, and only illness had gradually given her some space to study and write. Victoria Benedictsson published most of her work under the male pseudonym of Ernst Ahlgren. Her insistence on using a male pseudonym, at a time when a woman no longer had any marked difficulty in publishing under her own name, is indicative of a profound inner split which can be seen to hinge on the prevailing concept of femininity and the consequences of acknowledging female sexual desire. The late short story 'Ur morkret' ('Out of the Darkness', 1888) is a woman's account of the failure of her life. Brought up by her father, the young girl has behaved like a boy up to the point when, out horse-riding with him, a moment's cowardice on her part has made her aware of his view of womanhood as 'something repugnant, an unmitigated disaster from birth on'.29 The ability to apply the male gaze to herself has shattered her sense of identity and ruined her life, bringing her to the point where she is experiencing 'the weight of the guilt of the entire race' on her shoulders: 'I am feeling it with the nerves of a woman and seeing it with the eyes of a man'.30 As a published author, Victoria Benedictsson was able to transcend the conventional role of woman and gain a foothold in the world of men. But her freedom could never be more than relative since any attempt at realising herself fully, which had to include an acknowledgement of her sexuality, would inevitably reduce her to the traditional confines of woman. Her major works can be read as struggles to control and marginalise a desire which nevertheless remains central to these texts, with her diary, published in full only

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recently, eventually bringing the role of female sexual desire into the open. Victoria Benedictsson's first novel, Pengar (Money, 1885), tells the story of Selma who is denied the opportunity to develop her artistic talent and who is instead persuaded by the minister who is bringing her up to marry a wealthy, older man. The experiences of her wedding night, which leave her filled with revulsion, form the prelude to a marriage pervaded by disharmony and oppression, with the text formulating a stinging critique of the legal and moral standards that make marital relationships of this kind acceptable. The critical perspective on Selma's marriage is sharpened by her relationship with her cousin Richard, a doctor with whom she begins to enjoy a deepening friendship marked by intellectual equality and total frankness. But although the narrative is fuelled by their mutual feelings, Selma goes on to quench hers: forever sullied by a marital relationship into which, moreover, she feels she has been bribed by a leading representative of society, she insists on maintaining her relationship with Richard on a purely intellectual level. In explicit terms, then, female desire here becomes something forbidden; but Richard does give Selma the impetus to break loose from her marriage and go abroad to prepare for a career of her own. Implicitly, however, the narrative fails to be quite so restrictive. The plot of Fru Marianne (Mistress Marianne, 1887), Victoria Benedictsson's second novel, amounts to a different strategy for marginalising female desire. Marianne, who comes from a middle-class background with conventional notions of the role of woman, marries a farmer and finds herself transposed into a context requiring her independent and equal contribution. However, she falls in love with a friend of her husband's; and as if sheltering behind the official moral disapproval of this relationship, the text embarks on descriptions of it that are far more extensive than those depicting Selma and Richard in Money. The affair comes to an end and Marianne learns to excel as a hard-working wife and mother, but the split in her character unveiled by the text remains. Victoria Benedictsson's diary, consisting of Stora boken (The Big Book) and Dagboken (The Diary), written between March 1882 and the summer of 1888 and published in full in three volumes between 1978 and 1985, offers unique insights both into the

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problems she faced in establishing herself as a writer and into her personality. Three categories of material can be discerned in The Big Book and The Diary. The first consists of folk tales, sketches of local people, anecdotes, reviews, and fragments of literary texts — all indicative of the determination with which Victoria Benedictsson set about realising her ambition to become a writer. A second category consists of studies of people and includes dialogues which appear to be rendered verbatim, with an unfailing ear for the registers and nuances of language. The third category focuses on the author herself, with her relationship with the Danish critic Georg Brandes at the centre. In this relationship, into which Victoria Benedictsson entered as an acknowledged and successful writer and thus in one sense as Georg Brandes's equal, her view of female sexuality as inseparable from conventional gender hierarchies is illustrated with alarming inevitability. About this relationship she can write openly: I have wanted to know what it would be like to see the man one could love opening his arms towards one. I wanted to know what it would be like to press one's body close to this slender figure, to be caressed by these hands, to be kissed by these lips and embraced by these arms. Now I know. My face has felt this soft beard, my face has leant into this quiet nook that a woman in love always seeks when she is wanting to hide her quandary, and my hands have smoothed this greying hair, my fingers plunging deep-into its rich masses.31 But in due course she, like the near-anonymous woman in 'Out of the Darkness', becomes one who is 'nothing in her own right, for she is merely part of her sex'.32 To Victoria Benedictsson, the only way out of this trap was suicide. It is not only the intensity of her plight that is exceptional: still more remarkable is her ability to formulate it in writing virtually up to the end. ECONOMIC EXPANSION AND SUFFRAGE

The 1880s have been pinpointed as a turning-point in the economic development of Sweden:

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Early in the decade, Sweden was an agricultural society with over two-thirds of the population living on farms; later in the decade, a generation after Germany and at least a decade after Denmark, the society was launched on the path to becoming a modern industrial society.33 This transformation was boosted by a rapidly expanding engineering industry, benefiting from a string of major inventions: Lars Magnus Ericsson's telephone; Gustaf Dalen's automatic light for lighthouses and Aga cooker; Sven Wingquist's self-adjusting ball-bearings; and Alfred Nobel's dynamite, to name but the best known. By the time of the International Stockholm Exhibition in 1897, Swedish industrial products had achieved international fame. What, then, did the industrial developments mean in terms of employment for women? Working-class women had traditionally been employed in sawmills, iron mines and the early manufactories, and throughout the second half of the nineteenth century technological advances in combination with a degree of educational provision were opening up new areas. Women were increasingly to be found in the telegraph service, the postal service and in offices as well as in industrial employment. While nursing and teaching — in the elementary system and in girls' schools — had quickly developed into traditional women's spheres, those women who set up businesses of their own also tended to be found in predictable areas such as the provision and distribution of food and clothing. Changes to legislation helped to create new opportunities, but on the whole the beneficiaries were single, middle-class women. Some measures, such as the ban on women working underground and working during the night (1909), effectively reduced the opportunities for employment, especially among working-class women.34 Sweden long lagged behind the rest of Europe with regard to basic democratic rights. While Norway, which remained in a union with Sweden until 1905, had introduced universal suffrage for men in 1898, the reform was not introduced in Sweden until 1909. In the same year, 300,000 Swedish workers were involved in storstrejken, the General Strike, the biggest trade union mobilisation in the world until the events in France in May 1968.35 Hjalmar Branting, leader of the Social Democratic Party and

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later to become the country's first Social Democratic Prime Minister, had been elected to the Second Chamber in 1896. The next two decades saw far-reaching confrontations between the emerging power structures and the traditional ones, including an attempt by the king, as late as 1914, to assert his personal power. The introduction of parliamentarism in 1917 strengthened the democratic foundations of the Swedish political system and added to the stability which was to become a prerequisite for the country's successful domestic policy throughout much of the twentieth century. With the outbreak of the First World War, Sweden declared its neutrality. Consequently, the major impact of the war consisted in extensive food shortages. As a neutral country, Sweden also became the focal point for various peace efforts. One of the more significant peace campaigns was conducted by women, who had begun to organise on an international level as part of the struggle for suffrage. The Swedish campaign for women's suffrage had been slow to get under way and also Jacked the radicalism that had come to mark the campaigns in the other Scandinavian countries. The Association for Women's Political Suffrage, Foreningen for kvinnans politiska rostrdtt, was founded in 1902 and became a national organisation in 1903; ten years later, its membership had climbed to around 17,000.36 The Association published a newspaper, Rostrdtt for kvinnor (Votes for Women), arranged public meetings, and also supported the production of plays on the topic of votes for women. Members worked on converting Liberal and Social Democrat Members of Parliament to their cause, and as early as 1909 there was a majority for women's suffrage in the Second Chamber.37 Swedish women were finally granted the right to vote in national elections in 1919. By 1921, four out of the 230 members of the Second Chamber were women, and in 1924, the first woman took her seat among 149 male colleagues in the First Chamber. THE MODERN BREAKTHROUGH: THE LATER PHASES

With regard to cultural trends, much of this period continues to be dominated by the ideas of the Modern Breakthrough. A history of Swedish literature published in 1987 describes the

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preoccupations of the country's authors and artists during the Modern Breakthrough in terms of a spiral movement: from a progressive social and political awakening with topical debate, with depictions of real life and social criticism, to a tide of individualist Nietzscheanism, worship of art, joie de vivre and National Romanticism, on to zfin de siecle atmosphere of aestheticism, symbolism, mysticism, decadence and disillusion, and finally back to a climate of strengthened social and political front lines where battle-cries, realism and proletarian themes, a cult of the will and a new modernist spirit of the age assert themselves.38 Swedish literature of the 1890s reacted against the 'dull weather' texts of the previous decade, advocating instead a greater role for the imagination, for aestheticism and for an idealism inspired by classical antiquity and the Renaissance. With poets such as Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940) and Gustaf Froding (1860-1911) in the vanguard, this became an era of National Romanticism, the celebration of the country's historical heritage and local traditions capturing a rural Sweden on the verge of irrevocable change. Yet the authors of this period also retained a wider and often radical perspective, some of them becoming advocates of political reform and the democratisation of suffrage: The novelist Selma Lagerlof was active in the struggle for women's suffrage; and recently published letters to her close friend, the writer Sophie Elkan, have revealed how acutely she experienced the pressures of being a woman writer at a time when the literary establishment was wholly dominated by men.39 Her novels and short stories, however, do not bring up the situation of women in the explicit terms preferred by the women writers of the 1880s: a superb storyteller, Selma Lagerlof instead integrates women characters into texts which can be read in great depth, as has been demonstrated not least by recent feminist and psychoanalytical approaches (see Chapter 3). The argument about the position of women was given a new impetus and direction by the contributions of Ellen Key (1849-1926). Ellen Key, who was in the forefront of the public debate in Sweden from the 1890s until well into the twentieth century, in this and many other areas, came from a liberal

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background and had extensive interests in education, sustaining these by working as a teacher and lecturer. She was a friend of Anne-Charlotte Leffler and Victoria Benedictsson and also knew Alfhild Agrell. Among her best-known works are Barnets drhundrade (The Century of the Child, 1900) and Kdrleken och dktenskapet (Love and Marriage, 1911). Her texts were "widely translated and gained her considerable international fame. Ellen Key's thinking was based on her social commitment in combination with her belief in individualism and evolutionism.40 Her views on love and marriage extended the radicalism of the 1880s. Women, in her opinion, ought to have education and training to enable them to take up paid employment. In this way, they would not have to resort to marriage for financial reasons, and marriage would become a relationship founded on love between two equal partners. According to Ellen Key, a loveless marriage was more sinful than free love;41 and she shocked many of her contemporaries by emphasising a woman's right to sexual fulfilment in a relationship.42 Ellen Key's adherence to Spencerian evolutionism, which involved the rejection of conventional Christianity, was to become particularly important to her ideas on education and on the social role of women. With the way of life of the individual determining the future,43 she perceived the impact of education as decisive, and here the good home provided her with the perfect educational model. She regarded motherhood as women's 'highest cultural task';44 indeed, motherhood, in her opinion, had the potential to transform the world. For this reason it was essential that woman, while preparing for her new responsibilities in society at large, retained her difference in relation to man, or she would find herself facing the challenge 'like a farmer with perfect tools — but no seed-corn!'.45 In Cheri Register's summary, Ellen Key envisaged a new social order that placed in the center of human existence the affirmation of life symbolized by the mother-child relationship. By appealing to women to 'listen to the message life betokens', she hoped to counter what she saw as a growing disregard for human life marked by prostitution, militarism, and exploitation of labor.46

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Ellen Key's emphasis on woman's difference was to become a significant strand in twentieth-century Swedish feminism, represented in the thought and work of Elin Wagner in particular. However, with Sweden's Social Democrats advocating equality, the position gradually came to seem outmoded. Emilia Fogelklou (1878-1972), a teacher who in 1909 became the first woman in Sweden to gain a degree in theology, predictably disagreed with Ellen Key's rejection of Christianity but broadly shared most of her views on the situation of woman.47 Emilia Fogelklou's feminism soon became bound up with pacifism, but the connection between her feminism and theology was to yield even more interesting results, including an influential study of St Bridget (1919). In the volume Bortom Birgitta (Prior to St Bridget, 1940), Emilia Fogelklou explored traces of a matriarchal past in Sweden, a task in which her friend Elin Wagner also took a livery interest (see Chapter 4). Emilia Fogelklou also published three autobiographical volumes: Arnold (1944), Barhuvad (Bare-Headed, 1950), and Resfdrdig (Ready to Leave, 1954). The working-class writers who came to the fore in Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century amply illustrate the educational significance of the popular movements and of relatively new institutions such as the folk high schools. These writers helped to focus an alternative ideology, with arbetardiktning, writing by, about and for a working-class audience, a more powerful strand in twentieth-century literature in Sweden than in any of the other Scandinavian countries or in Britain, France or Germany.48 While most of the early working-class writers were men, including the novelist Gustav Hedenvind-Eriksson (1880-1967) and the poet Dan Andersson (1888—1920), one woman is to be found among them. Maria Sandel (1870-1927) supported herself by working in the textile industry and published three novels and three volumes of short stories. She writes about the everyday life of working-class women, her unflinching realism and ear for dialogue at once conveying the plight and celebrating the strength of these women. The short stories in her first book, Vid svdltgrdnsen (Close to Starving, 1908), focus on motherhood, including a controversial aspect such as abortion, but the texts also highlight the significance of sisterhood as an integral part of working-class solidarity. The novel Virveln (The Vortex, 1913) is

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set during the General Strike of 1909 and combines the stories of several women characters. The new generation of middle-class novelists which began to make its mark around 1910 was inevitably affected by the breakthrough of the working-class writers, with traditional middle-class values and positions repeatedly called into question in the works of these 'bourgeois realists'. Several of these novelists, which included writers such as Sigfrid Siwertz (1882-1970) and Ludvig Nordstrom (1882—1942), were also successful journalists. Thus Elin Wagner, the leading woman writer of this generation, combined the two strands throughout her life, her newspaper articles retaining an immediacy which complemented her increasingly sophisticated novels. While Elin Wagner's early novels can be read as portraits of women in new professions, her mature work exploits mythical patterns to formulate a radical critique of the position of women in a patriarchal system. The texts from the first decade of her literary career also testify to her preoccupation with the challenge from Strindberg (see Chapter 4). CONCLUSION What is remarkable about this early period, given the overall position of women in Swedish society and the very late introduction of female suffrage, is the prominence that women writers managed to achieve against the odds. The role of women writers in establishing the realist novel is conspicuous, as are the successes of women playwrights in the first half of the 1880s — in a genre, moreover, in which it has proved notoriously difficult for women to make their mark. The stature of the work of Victoria Benedictsson is equally noteworthy; and with Selma Lagerlof we arrive at Sweden's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909) and the first woman ever to be elected a member of the prestigious Swedish Academy (1914). The second woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy was to be Elin Wagner, in 1944. Perhaps no less remarkable is the fact that so few of these women attempted to combine their literary careers with conventional women's roles. While Fredrika Bremer, Selma Lagerlof, Ellen Key and Maria Sandel remained single, Alfhild Agrell, Anne-Charlotte Leffler and Elin Wagner divorced their husbands, with only AnneCharlotte Leffler marrying again. Those who had children were

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33

in a distinct minority (Emilie Flygare-Carlen, Anne-Charlotte Leffler, Victoria Benedictsson); and only Emilie Flygare-Carlen exemplifies the pattern, not infrequently found among English nineteenth-century women writers, of the widow taking up writing to support herself and her children.49 When in her late twenties Fredrika Bremer described herself, with evident satisfaction, as 'betrothed [ . - . ] — to my pen';50 and it is clear that for many of the women writers of this early period the absence of a husband and children was a prerequisite for their literary careers. But only Sophie von Knorring and Fredrika Bremer belonged to the upper or upper middle classes and were able to devote themselves to writing without financial worries. A writer like Alfhild Agrell struggled with mounting financial difficulties;51 and for all those who were dependent on a professional career to support themselves, the pressures were considerable. Selma Lagerlof, Ellen Key, Emilia Fogelklou, Maria Sandel and Elin Wagner all belonged to this latter category, with Maria Sandel never able to give up her work as a machine-knitter and Selma Lagerlof not able to resign from her teaching post until in her late thirties. The successes of these early women writers were not confined to Sweden or even Scandinavia. The novelists of the 1830s and 1840s were widely translated, with Fredrika Bremer achieving wide international fame and her novel Hertha appearing simultaneously in Swedish, English and German in 1856. The attention given abroad to the playwrights of the early 1880s added to the international standing of contemporary Swedish literature; and in the early decades of this century Ellen Key achieved a major international reputation. The fame of Selma Lagerlof provides a fitting climax; and as late as 1938, when she celebrated her 80th birthday, she remained the most widely translated of Sweden's writers.52

2 Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) STATURE, LIFE AND IDEAS

Fredrika Bremer's debut in 1828 heralded the emergence of women novelists on a broad front in Sweden. Underlining the novelty of her project, she entitled her first works Teckningar utur Hvardagslifvet (Sketches from Everyday Life}; and she was to continue to use this label and variations on it along with the individual titles of her novels. Her subject matter and the originality and freshness with which it was treated delighted her audience: 'Her excellence as a writer', wrote the effusive anonymous reviewer in the Westminster Review of the English translation of Hemmet (The Home, 1839): arises from her fidelity to nature, her power of seizing and delineating minute differences of character; and the charm of her works lies in the glimpses she affords us, less perhaps of Sweden than of Paradise on Earth, - the Paradise of the social affections'.1 No previous family novels had succeeded in 'studying the essence of family life and turning up the domestic heat' to the extent that Fredrika Bremer's did, which had the effect of making them seem excitingly new even in Britain and the United States.2 In the twentieth century, however, Fredrika Bremer's fame waned quickly, and the acknowledgements of her contribution to Swedish literature soon became little more than perfunctory. The publication of her letters (1915-1920) had the effect of shifting the attention from her novels to her personality; and surveying her achievement in 1948 Algot Werin, a professor of literature as well as a critic, did not hesitate to claim that Fredrika Bremer 'Nowadays [. . .] really only lives as a name and a symbol. [. . .] It does not matter if her novels are forgotten'.3 Algot Werin instead concentrated on her travel writing, the product of nearly

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35

two years spent in the United States and of a lengthy journey on the Continent and in Palestine towards the end of Fredrika Bremer's life. Feminist literary criticism has helped to shift the attention back to the novels and has begun to indicate some of their facets. Thus Birgitta Holm has pinpointed the role of Famillen H*** (The Colonel's Family, 1830—31) as a work of middle-class realism by a woman writer, approaching the text with Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic as one of her tools;4 while Karin Carsten Monten has discerned an elaborate mythical pattern beneath the apparent realism of Fredrika Bremer's most outspoken plea for women's emancipation, the novel Hertha (1856).5 If a new image of Fredrika Bremer as a novelist is emerging, it is as yet fragmented. At the immediate level Fredrika Bremer is a realist; but, I want to argue, as a woman writing at a time of extensive patriarchal dominance, she also needed to develop the subversive dimensions of her texts. Her breakthrough as a realist coincided with the peak of the Swedish Romantic period, and from the Romantics she borrowed, as I shall show, the means of evolving these additional dimensions. In doing so, moreover, she has given some of the standard motifs of Swedish Romanticism a distinctly feminist colouring. Celebrated though it has been, Fredrika Bremer's 'realism of everyday life' was strictly confined to the middle-class sphere. Coming from an aristocratic background, she lacked insight into the life of the lower classes, a shortcoming she was often to deplore. Fredrika Bremer's father was a foundry owner who had made most of his wealth in Finland, which up to 1809 was Swedish territory. Fredrika was born in Finland in 1801, but the family soon settled in Sweden. In wintertime the Bremer family, which eventually included five daughters and one son, would reside in an apartment in Stockholm, while the summer was usually spent on the family estate at Arsta, south of the capital. The daughters experienced a rigid upbringing with daily timetables and a minimum of freedom: in Stockholm, where they were not allowed to play outside, they were encouraged to take exercise by holding on to the backs of chairs and jumping up and down. Like her sisters, Fredrika much preferred the summer breaks at Arsta with its park and rural

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surroundings. It is no accident that many of Fredrika Bremer's texts reveal a sharp town—country dichotomy, with the countryside invariably depicted as a place of self-discovery, insight and revival. Educated privately, Fredrika Bremer enjoyed writing from an early age and also developed into a talented painter of miniature portraits. However, one of her sisters has revealed that young Fredrika could also be violently destructive: she would cut bits off the curtains or her own dresses, and she enjoyed throwing objects into the fire and watching them burn.6 In her twenties, Fredrika Bremer suffered depression; she was subsequently to refer to the 'non-life' she saw stretching ahead of her. But during a winter at Arsta she began to help the sick and the poor and decided to devote her life to nursing. It was with the needy in mind that she had her first texts published, but only gradually did she accept that she might be able to devote her life to writing. Her encounter with Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism appears to have played a decisive role: the notion of 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' made Fredrika Bremer realise that she could make a more significant contribution as an author than as a nurse.7 That Jeremy Bentham was an atheist does not seem to have troubled Fredrika Bremer, who was herself deeply religious. Fredrika Bremer published a dozen novels between 1830 and 1858, and from the very beginning the emphasis is on the situation of women. In part, her feminism was clearly a product of her background and upbringing, her urge to develop her self and realise her ambitions clashing with the conventional restrictions on the life of an upper-class woman in early nineteenth-century Sweden. Highly illuminating is the retort which Fredrika Bremer wrote in 1827, the year before her literary debut, to a sermon by the future archbishop of Sweden, Johan Olof Wallin, 'Om Qvinnans stilla kallelse' ('On the Quiet Calling of Woman'). In her reply - which was not published until after Fredrika Bremer's death - she boldly challenges the Lutheran notion of women as wives and mothers. Not only does she paint a ruthlessly realistic picture of marriage and family life on the basis of the endless wifely patience advocated by Johan Olof Wallin, provocatively coupling it with male dominance and even 'tyranny',8 but she also makes an eloquent case for the social significance of the single woman, a theme subsequently reinforced in her novels. Particularly interesting is her reference

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37

to the situation of the woman who shows that she possesses 'genius, talents, powers that like the flames of the fire must break out into the open and absorb air, or consume the soul in which they are contained'.9 It was Fredrika Bremer who took to describing herself, a few years later, as being 'betrothed [...]- to my pen'.10 A crucial influence on Fredrika Bremer's thinking was the informal academic education on which she embarked in the early 1830s, at a time when the Swedish universities remained closed to women. A young headmaster, Per Johan Bokliri, taught her philosophy and religion; and their correspondence bears witness to the advanced level of their exchanges. He nourished her passion for knowledge and truth: in one of her early letters to him she declares her motto to be 'light! light! above all! even if in its clarity I were to find myself to be coal-black!!'.11 Guided by her teacher, Fredrika Bremer studied Plato and the German Romantic philosophers, including Schelling and Herder, as •well as Hegel and a range of theologians. The Romantic notion of man and woman as equals, both created in the image of God, inevitably appealed to her. There is a recurring cluster of images in Fredrika Bremer's texts concerning the chrysalis and the butterfly. In a letter to Per Johan Boklin she provides a description worthy of a Linnaeus of the final stages in the life cycle of a chrysalis that she had kept in her room throughout the winter, culminating in the magnificent large moth leaving through the open window and 'shooting out straight as an arrow above the lilac hedges into the calm clear air'.12 To Fredrika Bremer the symbolism is far-reaching: 'in the liberation of the moth', she writes, 'I was celebrating the liberation of all souls'.13 The emancipation of women is ultimately part of the same overall Christian pattern; indeed, the Swedish theologian Brita Stendahl has pinpointed Fredrika Bremer's radical Christian faith as the driving force behind her feminism.14 When Fredrika Bremer in her novels places the everyday life of women in the foreground, her aim is to bring out the connections between this sphere and the heavenly one. In an early letter to her teacher, she expands on her understanding of the situation of humankind in the light of her reading of Plato: each human being, she feels, has at one stage been much closer to God, but here on earth this affinity with the ideal is accessible only in terms of faint glimpses.15 Seen from Fredrika Bremer's perspective, the task of the author is to reinforce these

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glimpses, to make her readers aware of their divine origin, and to help bridge the gap between heaven and earth. This concept of the role of the author is of course a common Romantic one; but as a woman, Fredrika Bremer showed characteristic boldness in adopting it. And she did not hesitate to set out her ambitions: in an early letter to Per Johan Boklin she states that she wants to become something much more than a Madame de Stael; I would like to become an author to whose works everyone who is sad, depressed, and troubled (and especially everyone of my own sex who is suffering) could go, assured of finding in them a word of redress, of comfort or encouragement.16 At a time, moreover, when poetry was the predominant genre, Fredrika Bremer was to develop the Romantic notion of the role of the author almost exclusively in terms of the novel. The consistency of her ideas is apparent from an essay published in 1853, 'Om romanen sasom var tids epos' ('On the Novel as the Epic of our Time'), in which she defines the novel, as opposed to the pagan epic, as having been 'baptised in the life of Christianity', and asserts that the novel is 'one of the most profoundly influential forms of art produced by our culture'.17 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Fredrika Bremer in one of her last novels goes as far as to make a covert plea for women's right to the priesthood,18 for their right to broadcast their words from the pulpit and thus become society's official mediators between heaven and earth. Her novels place considerable emphasis on the impact of female creativity, developing the concept both in terms of narrative form and at the level of metaphor. Fredrika Bremer's fiction shows a marked preference for female narrators and for traditional feminine forms such as the epistolary novel and the diary novel. The significance of female creativity is underlined by means of a range of metaphors which soon become decidedly aesthetic in quality and increasingly far-reaching in their implications. These metaphors can be seen to point beyond the realism of Fredrika Bremer's texts to the level of symbolism and myth where her feminism so strikingly unfolds. When Fredrika Bremer formulated her subversive demand for women's right to preach from the pulpit, she was a novelist of international fame who had been lionised during a two-year stay

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39

in the United States, and whose works were regularly translated into German and French as well as English. In Sweden, her circle of friends included some of the most eminent intellectuals and composers of the period. She maintained a huge correspondence in four languages and received friends from abroad in her home. In the 1860s Margaret Howitt, the daughter of Fredrika Bremer's English translator, spent a year with her, subsequently publishing Twelve Months with Fredrika Bremer (1866), which provides valuable insights into the everyday life of her famous hostess. Fredrika Bremer died at Arsta in 1865. THE NOVELS: THE FIRST DECADE

Fredrika Bremer's first novel, Famillen H*** (The Colonel's Family, 1830-31), uses realism to position itself as a contrast to the type of romantic entertainment allegedly preferred by women. The setting is a family circle but, as Fredrika Bremer explained to Per Johan Boklin, 'I hardly think there is a wider field - and heaven and hell ought to live within it'.19 The novel can be read as an analysis of the situation of women in the context of a period and a social class that left them with virtually no option but marriage. Leading the challenge to the novel of romantic entertainment is Emilia, about to be married to a seemingly ideal young man but overcome by doubt as her wedding day approaches. Although her marriage eventually becomes a happy one, the conventional notions of romantic love could hardly be more distant. Her sister Julie is satisfied with her own engagement but gradually realises that her shallow and lazy fiance does not love her: it is Julie who memorably likens married life to a larder in which she will find herself 'like a lump of mouldering cheese'.20 She discovers both wider horizons and love in her marriage to an older man who respects her integrity; but only Emilia's and Julie's youngest sister, disabled and ugly and thus unmarriageable, has the freedom to develop her talents and devote herself to the intellectual and artistic pursuits she so much enjoys. Beyond the three sisters we glimpse their mother, affectionate, understanding and forgiving, the guarantor of the stability of this family and one of the main providers of the harmony which can turn it into an image of the heavenly ideal. This family, which also includes an enigmatically gloomy but

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witty father and three sons, is depicted by the novel's refreshingly unconventional narrator, Christina Beata Workaday, employed in the household and as adept at tackling family problems as she is at making wine jelly. She,reinforces the female focus of the text and emphatically distances her narrative from the type of novel merely providing romantic entertainment for women. One famous passage is that in which Christina Beata Workaday is setting the scene for the meeting of two young lovers and allows herself to be carried away - only to discover that the room has become filled with cherubs with wreaths of roses. She puts down her pen, drinks two glasses of water, opens the window, takes deep breaths of the chilly April air and observes the everyday scenes outside. Returning to her manuscript she finds the cherubs gone, and she pens her most explicit aesthetic declaration: *A picture of reality should be like a clear brook, which as it flows reproduces clearly and faithfully those objects reflected in its rippling surface, revealing through its crystal the sight of its bed and the objects resting there'.21 The Colonel's Family, then, is a celebration of the family circle radiating from a well-balanced marriage, the celebration supported by some eminently compatible imagery of female creativity, with Christina Beata Workaday's famous wine jelly emerging as a metaphor for the novel22 in a text that provocatively links mental sustenance to physical nourishment. The Colonel, however, has a blind niece, whose silent presence undermines the domestic harmony. She brings out a different side of Christina Beata Workaday: her fondness for writing poetry and contemplating the moon.23 Birgitta Holm has emphasised the special qualities of those sections of the novel which deal with Elisabeth's story: in contrast to the prevailing realism, these sections introduce a 'Romantic code' which opens up perspectives into the individual soul.24 While the Colonel's eldest son has been able to choose a military career, Elisabeth, who has also wanted to live and die for her country, has had to channel her ambitions in a more womanly direction. In the process, she has fallen in love with the Colonel; but his coldness has led to her incarceration in an asylum and an attempt by her to kill him. In a climactic thunderstorm, which illustrates the affinity between Elisabeth and the unfettered forces of nature, she is at long last able to express her desire. As a

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woman whose ambitions cannot be satisfied within the family circle, Elisabeth becomes a threat; and before she dies she extracts from the Colonel the admission that he, too, has loved her. The family is suddenly shaken to its foundations. A number of critics have read Elisabeth's story as a lapse by an inexperienced novelist into a conventional Romantic register.25 But women readers seem to have had little doubt as to its subversive significance. Thus Sophie Adlersparre, who with Sigrid Leijonhufvud wrote Fredrika Bremer's biography in the 1890s, has described how she, along with many of her contemporaries, had to read The Colonel's Family in a version from which Elisabeth's story had been excised.26 Although the novel ends on a note of reconciliation and happiness in which Elisabeth's fate, as Birgitta Holm has pointed out, has been instrumental,27 the fact remains that her story, along with the language employed by the narrator, has the effect of challenging the traditional family life which the novel posits as an ideal. If most women find fulfilment within the family circle, Elisabeth's story suggests that there are exceptions. Fredrika Bremer's next two novels, Presidentens dottrar (The President's Daughters, 1834) and Nina (1835), can be read as attempts to develop and reconcile the central contradiction in The Colonel's Family. Both novels focus on one family, with Nina directly continuing the previous work. In these two novels, the family sphere becomes the framework of a more far-reaching investigation into women's need for development and fulfilment, intellectually as well as emotionally. As a result of the presence of Mamsell Ronnquist, a governess who is also the narrator, The President's Daughters directly addresses the issue of women's education, with the central character, the President's eldest daughter Edla, illustrating the beneficial effects of intellectual occupations. In the last instance, however, the main beneficiary is still the family: given the freedom to immerse herself in studying, Edla becomes a more harmonious person and thus a better daughter. The case of her younger sister Nina, treated in the second novel, is more complex. Nina's will to live has been undermined by the death of her twin sister, and the combination of insecurity and lack of love threatens to land her in a feminine pattern conventional enough to engulf her. The President's Daughters has in its opening chapters the most

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ambitious and elaborate discussion of art to be found in a novel by Fredrika Brerner. The result of her studies with Boklin, this discussion pinpoints art as an additional link with the divine ideal and effectively defines female creativity in terms of female artistry, in a setting, moreover, dominated by classical Greek sculpture. The centrepiece is a tableau vivant of Pygmalion and Galathea in which the traditional emphasis on male creativity has been made subordinate to female creativity: the author of the tableau vivant is the female artist in the novel, who is thus responsible for bringing both Pygmalion and Galathea to life.28 In The President's Daughters the myth, along with the female artist, provide a perspective on Edla's development pointing to female ambitions beyond the family circle. But, in a> more subtle form, the myth is also present in Nina. Vague and insecure as she is throughout much of the novel, Nina can be read as a Galathea emerging from the marble. The novel's metaphor for female creativity, in other words, is the development of its central female character. It is significant that the creation of Nina-Galathea requires space far beyond that of the family home. The latter part of the novel is set in the far north of Sweden, in a wild and untamed country of endless forests, huge rushing rivers and snow-covered mountains. It is Fredrika Bremer's first attempt at Swedish exoticism, a dimension of her novels which was to be greatly appreciated abroad and which she soon began to cultivate for its own sake. In Nina, however, the Norrland landscape has an unmistakable symbolic function. Just as Elisabeth in The Colonel's Family is linked to nature, including the wild thunderstorm, so Nina needs this wilderness as the framework for the emergence of her integrity. In a landscape that kills her sister, who is fatally injured in floods, Nina is reborn as the love of a Norrland minister assists her in emerging as a full human being. In her study of archetypal patterns in women's fiction, the American feminist scholar Annis Pratt has emphasised the significance of what she calls 'the green-world archetype', stating that the '"experience" and "dreams" that are revealed in this recurrent archetypal pattern in women's fiction are of a sense of oneness with the cosmos as well as of a place to one side of civilization'.29 Her definition illuminates the role of the green-world archetype in Nina. Per Johan Boklin, however, was to criticise the novel in general and the characters of Nina and her minister in particular

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as excessively romantic,30 and Fredrika Bremer herself appears to have had second thoughts: 'I have in Nina spent too much time out of doors', she admitted to him.31 She started her next novel determined to control this urge — but then confessed to her teacher: 'However - in these [characters], in this cheerful, active life only half of my being is present. The other half wants the heavens — from which others are trying to push me away by force'.32 We need to approach Granname (The Neighbours, 1837) and Hemmet (The Home, 1839) with this dualism in mind. The Neighbours quickly established itself as one of Fredrika Bremer's best-loved novels. At one level, it brilliantly develops the realism for which she had become famous. Its most renowned character is ma chere mere — powerful, endlessly capable, outspoken, with a penchant for the proverbial turn of phrase, and utterly lacking in respect for conventions. But other characters, too, are sharply individualised, precise and vivid, among them the spinster, Miss Hellevi Husgafvel, who provides a social focus for the community in the inspiring setting of her 'Bird's Nest', and the young couple whose early marital life forms the framework of the narrative. If there is a romantic tinge to Fransiska's expectations, her life with the doctor whom she simply calls 'bear' quickly disposes of this, and her insights make for a narrative which combines a distinctive perspective with sympathy and a sense of humour. Fransiska, whose letters to a friend make up The Neighbours, steers clear of the type of highbrow discussion of art that appears in The President's Daughters. Yet art is central to the novel, introducing a dimension which clashes with the predominant realism. More than any other text by Fredrika Bremer, The Neighbours is a novel about music-making — and music, we are reminded, speaks of the meaning of life and the ultimate harmony of the universe.33 This is a view of music clearly inspired by the Romantics; and as Fransiska combines her letter-writing with the teaching of music, her creativity points far beyond the everyday life she is depicting. Significantly, music is central to the story that is the focus of the plot of The Neighbours. Ma chere mere has had a son, Bruno, who long ago took money from her, refused to repent and ran away from home after being cursed by her. This, clearly, is a version of the story of the Fall, with the depths of Bruno's depravity marked by his spell in the slave trade in foreign countries. But he is also

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longing for forgiveness and a new harmony, desires which find their expression in his love of music. Bruno is a Romantic hero, coloured too by Fredrika Bremer's reading of Goethe's Faust.34 But this character and that of ma chere mere also have mythical dimensions, their relationship opening up perspectives on the fertility goddess and her son, he who disappears and is mourned, only to emerge again like the vegetation of the new season. For Bruno does return, and the reconciliation between mother and son is one of the most powerful images of atonement in Fredrika Bremer's fiction. What is remarkable here is the female colouring of the universe of the text, with the figure ruling it mirroring not God the Father but the Great Mother. Fredrika Bremer was an avid reader of Scandinavian mythology, and she tends to exploit this material from a woman-centred angle.35 Along with the significance of music, this covert mythological pattern is indicative of the conflict that characterises Fredrika Bremer's novels of this period, of a search for that space which the realism of everyday life clearly cannot provide. In Hemmet (The Home, 1839) this conflict surfaces in somewhat different terms. Again, the emphasis is on an almost exuberant realism as an omniscient narrator, supported by the occasional letter by the wife and mother, paints the life of an upper middle-class family with six children, five of them girls. The chronology is more expansive than in Fredrika Bremer's previous works, allowing the narrator to depict the maturation of the relationship between Judge Frank and his wife and the development of their children into adolescence and adulthood. These are vivid, affectionate and often humorous pictures, with the family demonstrating its beneficial effects beyond its original circle as their friend the assessor, the private tutor, and an orphaned girl flourish within the Frank home. With several of the daughters growing up to build independent lives, outwith marriage, the novel also becomes a celebration of the family as a generator of the freedom and confidence that are fundamental to its female members achieving personal fulfilment. In the midst of this realism, there are glimpses of mythical patterns. Elise Frank's relationship with her eldest son again recalls that of the fertility goddess and her son; and Henrik's early death echoes that of the Christ-like Scandinavian god Balder. And here there is an indication of a wider framework for this mythical pair.

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Exploring nature, young Petrea discovers in it a mythical presence: her early encounter with Pan, god of the woods, makes the idea of 'a new and wonderful world' dawn on her 'with delightful thrills'.36 Petrea's experience, then, points to a fusion of nature and myth, the two spheres which, in a number of novels, have provided that crucial additional space. It is significant that Petrea has inherited her mother's talent for writing — indeed, the character has traditionally been identified with Fredrika Bremer - but as her search for her identity and role in life long remains confused, the mythical implications of those scenes in the forest which she so much enjoys are not fully developed. The conflict between realism and feminine space remains unresolved. LATER WORKS: A GROWING RADICALISM

While she was busy with The Neighbours and The Home, Fredrika Bremer had also been working on a play. Trdlinnan (The Bondmaid, 1840) is set in the Viking period, its subject matter and exploitation of Scandinavian mythology emerging as a challenge to the 'Gothicism' favoured by many of Fredrika Bremer's male contemporaries.37 It has been suggested that the pre-Christian setting, perhaps in combination with the novelty of the genre, has engendered the dissonances in the text: if it had not been for the reactions of Per Johan Boklin and another friend, these would have engulfed the conventional Bremerian harmony.38 It is possible that The Bondmaid contributed to the noticeably bolder approach, in Fredrika Bremer's next novel, to the conflict we have traced throughout her texts so far. En dagbok (A Diary, 1843), which traditionally has been seen as a contribution to the debate inspired by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's radical version of marriage and morals in Del gar an (Sara Videbeck, 1839), has for its subject, Fredrika Bremer announced to her teacher, the emancipation of women. 'For no one', she wrote in the same letter, can deny that love, life, enthusiasm are burning most warmly on earth in the hearts of women. If this holy flame were to be cultivated properly, if it were directed towards burning for great and noble goals — what an impulse would not be given to the entire life of society! and how beneficial and noble would

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Swedish Women's Writing not be the activities of women as friends, as wives and mothers, or simply and grandly as — women citizens!39

The emancipated woman in A Diary is the narrator and fictitious author, Sofia, who, at the age of thirty, has achieved financial independence. Again, the setting is an upper-class one as Sofia joins Selma, her stepsister, and Flora, her cousin, in the Stockholm apartment of her wealthy stepmother. As the young women are entertained at dances and on sleighing outings, their relationships with a circle of men are revealed. In a letter to Per Johan Boklin, Fredrika Bremer claimed that she had indulged in 'mental spirit-distilling' in A Diary,40 in other words that she had devoted too much attention to the love affairs of her characters; and the phrase has often been taken as proof that there are no further dimensions to these characters. The three young women eventually find their niches in life, Selma as the wife of a loving and liberal-minded man; Flora as the companion of her troubled brother; and Sofia, after a proud display of independence, as the wife of a widower and mother of his five children. Seen in this light, the novel is comparatively conventional, and the treatment of women's emancipation may appear disappointingly meagre. I want to suggest that the four female characters in their apartment can be read as images of the fertility goddess, as a reminder of an era of female significance and power which is ironically juxtaposed with the position of women in nineteenth-century Sweden. When Sofia sits down with her stepmother it is almost invariably to discuss politics and 'manage affairs of state'.41 The irony with which phrases of this kind are applied does not detract from their significance; and the implications of the preoccupations of the women are underlined by the setting of their discussions, in central Stockholm, just across from the Royal Palace. In the Royal Palace, moreover, the lady of the bed-chamber is a Signora Luna, who turns out to be married to a domineering Alexander the Great. Just as the moon goddess has succumbed to patriarchal dominance, so the Scandinavian fertility goddess appears as no more than a faint reflection of her former self. Nevertheless she is present in four versions - as the stepmother whose financial assets denote her power; as Selma, the goddess in her virginal aspect; as Sofia, the goddess in her motherly aspect; and as Flora, the goddess

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as concubine. In Scandinavian mythology, the mother and the concubine were represented by Freya and Frigg, while Skadi as the virgin may have completed the triad.42 And despite the urban setting, these goddesses are suggestively linked to nature, more particularly to the waters surrounding the islands on which the Swedish capital is built, and which Sofia depicts in changing light and shade. She herself can expand this affinity with nature in terms of her Finnish origins, which are also reflected in her insight into magic. The first version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, had appeared in 1835, and Fredrika Bremer, born in Finland, clearly saw its relevance to her own preoccupations. The male characters surrounding these female characters provide a conspicuous chronology. While the patriarchal Alexander the Great represents a foreign influence, national virtues are brought into focus by 'the Viking', the widower who falls in love with Sofia, and by Torsten Lennartson, who is associated with Sweden's era as a great power in the seventeenth century and who becomes Selma's husband. Both 'the Viking' and Torsten Lennartson hold remarkably enlightened views on the position of women. By contrast, it is the treacherous St Orme ('snake') with his French connections who turns out to be the villain as he exploits Flora and swindles the stepmother of her savings, thus further undermining the seat of the goddess. Ironically pinpointing the latter-day insignificance of the fertility goddess, the very presence of this elaborate mythological pattern gives a bold and radical edge to the discussion of women's emancipation in A Diary. In Syskonlif (Brothers and Sisters, 1848), Fredrika Bremer's radicalism has been expanded and deepened. The family circle has become a circle of brothers and sisters, its philanthropic activities suggestive of a Utopian and essentially Christian socialism. A recurring theme such as that of the woman artist has been integrated into this wider framework, with Lagertha Knutson's work on her sculptures of the three Norns, the embodiments of prophetic inspiration, noble effort and harmonious perfection,43 pointing beyond both the creation of the novel and its circle of characters to a new world. Fredrika Bremer had drawn inspiration from Saint Simon and Fourier,44 as well as from Utopian communities in the United States: when the brothers and sisters finally establish their ideal society, their model is the American Lowell.

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Fredrika Bremer's enthusiasm for the United States resulted in a two-year stay in that country (1849-51), her aim being to 'take a look at the future'.45 In particular, she wanted to study the conditions of women. Her attention was focused on women as home-makers and mothers,46 and she entitled her account of her travels Hemmen i den Nya Verlden (The Homes of the New World, 1853-54). Her investigations of family life, however, were part of a wider exploration of American society, and during her extensive travels she visited radical communities, educational establishments and even a slave auction in the deep South. She was introduced to a number of authors, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Hawthorne. During her return journey she spent some time in England, visiting Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London, and meeting authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley and the future George Eliot. Touring ragged schools, workers' cooperatives and philanthropic ventures in the slums, she found a new spirit, compared with what she had encountered only two years previously. For Fredrika Bremer, the symbol of this renewal was the Great Exhibition: she visited it four times, and her highly informative yet personal account of the Exhibition takes up the central section of her series of reports on England published in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet in 1852. Fredrika Bremer's subsequent efforts to channel the energies of Stockholm's upper-class and middle-class women into philanthropic work, inspired by American and English models, resulted in her 'Invitation to a Peace Alliance', published in The Times on 28 August 1854. Written in the early phase of the Crimean War, the 'Invitation' exhorts all Christian women to join forces to oppose 'the direful effects of war, and [contribute] by united and well-directed efforts, under the blessing of God, to the development of a state of peace, love and well-being'.47 The 'Invitation', which brought a rebuke from the editor of The Times, is important both as an illustration of the range of Fredrika Bremer's vision and as a cornerstone of feminist pacifist writing in Sweden. However excited Fredrika Bremer had been by the young and buoyant American society, she had missed the historical

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and mythical dimensions which she had come to regard as such an important part of her home environment. In pursuit of her conviction that religion and myth were pointers to the common roots of humankind, Fredrika Bremer embarked, in 1856, on a five-year journey in the Old World. This took her to Switzerland and Italy and subsequently to Palestine, Turkey and Greece. Lifvet i Gamla Verlden (Two Years in Switzerland and Italy, Travels in the Holy Land, Greece and the Greeks, 1860—62), like her account of her travels in America, represents a significant renewal of the genre of travel writing. Fredrika Bremer's last major work of fiction, Hertha (1856), powerfully confirms her imaginative powers as her central preoccupations, developed in terms of Swedish provincial life, are extended and imbued with universal significance via a newly prominent use of mythical patterns. In contrast to her previous novels, Hertha is described on the title page as a 'Sketch from Real Life', its plea for legal independence for single women backed up by a concluding appendix detailing recent pronouncements on the matter by Swedish courts. But its central character, Hertha, emerges not only as the oppressed daughter of a tyrannical old man but also as a sybil, priestess and goddess. Hertha is passionately convinced that women need education and the freedom to develop as individuals: If our education were not so wretched and our goal in life so very poor and constricted; if, rather than being encouraged to seek support outside ourselves, we were told at an early stage to seek it within ourselves, in our own powers; if we were allowed to devote our life and work to great and noble purposes; if we were allowed to listen to our inner voice and follow its promptings rather than all kinds of opinion outside us; if we were allowed to get work that we could love - then I am convinced that we would become noble and even happy, making laws for ourselves and for others too.48 While the relevance of Hertha's concern is illustrated by a vivid dream chronicling the oppression of women in many different countries, she remains at the mercy of a patriarchal father figure. However, the landscape of her native Kungskoping, with its ostracised single mother and its suffering poor, changes beyond

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recognition as the town is struck by a devastating fire. Fredrika Bremer's family ideal resurfaces as the committees set up to help the homeless structure themselves on the pattern of families, with the women's and the men's assistance societies soon joining in a society of brothers and sisters. The building of the new Kungskoping also results in a radical shift in the status of the oppressed daughter, who begins to emerge as a priestess and a goddess. Hertha's role as a mother goddess would seem to be confirmed by her relationship with a young man involved in the creation of the new town, for Yngve Frey Nordin, his names reinforcing his mythological significance, is clearly the son of the mother goddess.49 As pagan and Christian elements are inextricably linked in accordance with the formula adopted by the Romantics, Yngve overturns Hertha's conviction — the product of her patriarchal upbringing — that God is neither good nor just, making her perceive that God is love and that eternal love rules the world. And in common with Bruno in The Neighbours, Yngve conforms to the pattern of the goddess's son: having sustained a serious injury in the fire, he goes abroad to convalesce during the •winter and returns in spring, restored to health. Inspired by this relationship, Hertha continues the task of creating a new society. One of the two schools which she founds aims at enabling young women to explore themselves and their social role. The hall in which Hertha conducts her classes contains images of Christ as well as Iduna, the Scandinavian goddess who had the power to award eternal life; and, surrounded by her students among flowers and greenery, Hertha seems the embodiment of a Christianised version of the goddess. While her ailing father is seen to cling to the trappings of an irrelevant system, Hertha is laying the foundations for a world of individual freedom, mutual understanding and boundless unity in the name of God. As I have mentioned above, Hertha has traditionally been regarded as having influenced a change in Swedish legislation, with single women above the age of 25 gaining the right to acquire legal independence in 1858.50 The novelist who had had to go to some lengths, at the beginning of her career, to underline the difference between her texts and conventional novels of romantic entertainment, had established herself as a renowned realist whose depictions of contemporary Swedish life were seen to

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have an immediate relevance. Nearly a century and a half later, this relevance has inevitably faded, but the attention to aspects such as mythical patterns has brought out new and rewarding dimensions of Fredrika Bremer's texts. To my thinking, the mythical patterns complete the engendering of her narrative, at once subverting the realism for which she has become famous and adding to the radicalism of her work.

3

Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) LIFE AND ART

At Selma Lagerlof s small manor house of Marbacka, in the province of Varmland, present-day visitors are shown the corner where she used to sit as a child, listening to the stories and songs of her grandmother. And the guide will read the passage about her grandmother from Selma Lagerlof s Marbacka (1922), culminating in the account of the day when 'songs and stories drove away from the farm, sealed inside a long, black coffin, never to return'.1 The legacy of the oral tradition in Selma Lagerlof s oeuvre has long attracted interest. Oscar Levertin, a critic and professor of literature writing about her in 1903, introduced her as an 'anomaly': at a time which he perceived as heavy with intellectual calculation and scepticism, Selma Lagerlof was writing tales, texts brimming over with imagination and with unhesitating love of all living beings.2 The first biography of Selma Lagerlof (1927), written by the German Professor Walter Berendsohn, reinforced the image of the uniquely gifted storyteller who was drawing on the oral tradition she had encountered as a child.3 Not surprisingly, this emphasis has resulted in the erosion of Selma Lagerlof s stature as an artist. One of the most authoritative denials of her artistic skill is also very recent: in the most up-to-date history of Swedish literature (1989), the academic and novelist Sven Delblanc characterises her as 'an atavism, a brilliant survival from the distant past of story-telling';4 and to him she is, by implication, incapable of structuring and controlling any work on a larger scale.5 It is possible, however, to read the passage on Selma Lagerlof s grandmother in a different light. Rather than merely offering evidence of the author's dependence on the oral tradition, the text can be seen as illuminating the creative affinity between the child and the maternal body, singling out the role of the

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narrative associated with the mother figure in transcending and breaking down society's conventional boundaries. Grandmother, we are told, 'believed every word' she told the children; and [when] she had told them something really remarkable, she would look the little children deep in the eyes and say to them in her most convincing tone: 'All this is as true as the fact that I am seeing you and you are seeing me'.6 In recent years Swedish feminist literary critics such as Birgitta Holm and Ulla Torpe have approached Selma Lagerlof s texts in the context of Julia Kristeva's definition of poetic language as indicative of the semiotic relationship between the young child and its mother.7 'Selma Lagerlof s entire, highly visible oeuvre appears to draw its power from its bonding with that which is enigmatic, invisible', writes Ulla Torpe, who goes on to suggest that Selma Lagerlof s fondness for traditional but multi-layered narrative forms such as the tale and the legend can be seen in this context.8 There is a link here with the observation by Elin Wagner, Selma Lagerlof s Swedish biographer, regarding the preponderance of images in her texts: 'She knows that people once thought in images, not in concepts, and she is instinctively keeping close to this universal language'.9 Selma Lagerlof s texts also quickly proved to have a world-wide appeal. Fundamental to the perfection of Selma Lagerlof s immensely varied texts is her stylistic range, which encompasses the fairytale and the Icelandic saga as well as the legend and the modern psychological novel. As she once explained in a letter, 'I have always consciously searched for the appropriate style for my books, and I assure you [. . .] that we authors regard a book as close to completion when we have eventually found the style in which it can be written'.10 This chameleon-like quality makes Selma Lagerlof, the supposedly unsophisticated representative of an oral tradition, exceedingly difficult to define as a writer. To use Luce Irigaray's analysis of the situation of the woman writer in a male-dominated society, Selma Lagerlof s texts can be seen as illustrating that 'play with mimesis' by which woman may 'recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it'. If, Irigaray explains,

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Swedish Women's Writing women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere [. . .] [T]he issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.11

Selma Lagerlof is one of the most elusive of Swedish authors, and it is significant that she chose not to correct the various attempts at pigeonholing her.12 While much early research into her work was focused on biographical and genetic aspects, the interest in the texts has only been apparent since the late 1950s.13 Birgitta Holm's feminist re-reading of some of the central works has opened up new dimensions, but her author-centred psychoanalytical method still has the effect of making the personality of Selma Lagerlof loom large.14 The feminist reading I shall outline here is more specifically text-centred. Selma Lagerlof was born at Marbacka in 1858, the secondyoungest of five brothers and sisters. From her early years, she nourished artistic ambitions. 'Do you find it contradictory', she wrote to a friend while working on her first novel, 'if I tell you now that I have known ever since my childhood that I would become quite an eminent author. I am destined to this, and I do not know that I am haughty about it'.15 But although her middle-class background meant that she received a comparatively good education, it was only that of a girl: while her brother Daniel was able to attend Uppsala University, no such provision was made for his sisters. Young Selma's only major experience of life outside Varmland was a spell in Stockholm in her mid teens, for treatment for a hip complaint. Her condition, however, was to persist, leaving her lame for life. Selma was known in the family circle for her poetry and her plays for puppets, but letters dating from the late 1870s reveal how interminable she could find the winters at Marbacka. Her prospects changed when a speech she made at a wedding attracted the attention of a distant neighbour active in the women's movement. In 1882, Selma Lagerlof embarked on a teacher training course at the Women Teachers' College of Higher Education in Stockholm, founded only two decades earlier. The three years which she spent

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at the college were a watershed in her life. While evolving radical ideas about teaching, she was able to cultivate her interest in drama and contemporary literature and also established a reputation among her fellow students as a witty poet. But she felt unable to accommodate her own literary ambitions to the realism and naturalism prevalent at the time. 'I wondered how one could possibly write things down exactly as they were in real life, I thought it would be so boring for the author', she confided to a friend in 1894;16 and much later she was to explain how the rationalism of the fashionable approach dried up her creative powers: 'If I was not allowed to write about miracles, about the supernatural, I was useless'.17 Selma Lagerlof s craving, as always, was for the world where the boundaries dissolve. On qualifying in 1885, Selma Lagerlof obtained a post at a junior high school for girls in Landskrona, in the south of the country, where she was to stay for ten years. During this time, the family's beloved Marbacka had to be sold. When Selma Lagerlof was able to begin to repurchase the property in 1907, a project in which she was greatly assisted by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909, she gradually embarked on a structural transformation of the manor house. Not only was she seeing her childhood home acquire a new status as a place of literary pilgrimage: the radical changes to the building can be read as a text written on the basis of another text, the sequence of versions adding up to a process of personal myth-making that has had the effect of making its central object less and less accessible. THE RISE TO FAME

Selma Lagerlof made her breakthrough with her first book, Gosta Berlings saga (Gosta Berling's Saga), published in 1891. Puzzling to its reviewers,18 this novel has continued to resist attempts to interpret it within the confines of existing categories. Selma Lagerlof s kaleidoscopic text strikingly illustrates Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the novel as young and in a state of flux, a genre that parodies other genres and 'exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language'.19 While Selma Lagerlof had had a vision, during her years in Stockholm, of how her Varmland stories might be used for a work of literature — an experience described in 'En saga om en

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saga' ('A Story about a Story', 1902) — she had struggled long and hard to do justice to her material. The novelist Kerstin Ekman has pointed to the restricting effect of the works by Esaias Tegner (1782-1846) and the Finland-Swedish poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804—1877) which Selma Lagerlof attempted to use for her models: 'It was a happy moment', Kerstin Ekman writes, 'when she turned inwards and dared to claim that her subjectivity was as good as theirs and certainly worth using as the basis of a major literary experiment'.20 Set in Varmland in the 1820s, Gosta Bering's Saga is full of allusions to other texts: there are traces of Goethe's Faust, of the myth of King Arthur and of the story of Don Juan, among others — but at the same time these references are held at arm's length and treated with an exuberant assurance, as the butts of mockery and laughter. And the form and style of Selma Lagerlof s work are strikingly innovative. Although Gosta Berling's Saga is a novel, each individual chapter has the finished quality of a short story, and, to a large extent, each chapter has its own distinctive style. Having experimented with poetry and having tried, too, to turn the material into a drama, Selma Lagerlof had hit upon what she described as a 'style so bold that I myself was amazed by it',21 'a style of my own in between poetry and prose'.22 Yet this stylistic range in no way threatens the coherence of the novel: while working on the complete version Selma Lagerlof, displaying considerable self-knowledge, confided to Sophie Adlersparre that 'my ability to structure my material is as immense as my imagination'.23 The text of Gosta Berling's Saga distances its own material, the analepses in combination with the form and style opening up a vast narrative space that allows the novel's elements of tale and myth to blossom. The plot, in an allusion to classical symmetry, focuses on one year, its starting-point being the fall of the Major's Wife at Ekeby. In charge of seven iron foundries and equally at home transporting charcoal from the forests and entertaining at lavish parties, she is the most powerful woman in Varmland: If I beckon with one of my fingers, the county governor will leap, and if I beckon with two, the bishop will leap, and if I beckon with three, the members of the chapter and the

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aldermen and all the foundry owners in Varmland will dance a reel in the square in Karlstad.24 With her boundless influence and sense of responsibility, the Major's Wife, to quote the Swedish Lagerlof scholar Vivi Edstrom, 'embodies the very principle of maintaining life and preserving society, which in varying forms is also reflected in the other female characters in the book'.25 As has often been pointed out, one of the literary ancestors of the Major's Wife is ma chere mere in Fredrika Bremer's The Neighbours, and it is significant that they have similar mythical proportions: with her instinctive affinity with all living beings, the Major's Wife has also been compared to the Great Mother.26 But in Selma Lagerlof s novel, the challenge to this female power base is more radical and far-reaching than it is in Fredrika Bremer's. The Major's Wife turns out to be a victim of patriarchal society, a woman who has been made to marry for the sake of money and who, in her own opinion, is no more than 'a dressed-up corpse'.27 The Major, on learning of her lover and the origin of the seven foundries, banishes her from Ekeby; and the result is that not only these estates but the entire neighbourhood become leaderless, imperilled by a lack of economic management and cowering in anticipation of the storm which the Major's Wife has predicted will ravage the country.28 The fact that she embarks on a pilgrimage to her aged mother in the north, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation after the rupture caused by her marriage, puts the focus on the significance of the mother-daughter relationship and imparts to the narrative a crucial underlying rhythm. The year of this pilgrimage is, more prominently, 'the year of the cavaliers', when the twelve men whom the Major's Wife has been maintaining at Ekeby take over the estate and the ironworks attached to it, having vowed to do 'nothing that is sensible or useful or old-womanish'.29 The cavaliers, a number of whom are retired soldiers, devote much of their time to playing cards, drinking and womanising; as has been pointed out, they can be seen as poking fun at the heroic ideal, blatantly undermining the martial dimensions of the traditional epic.30 At the same time, the cavaliers are at the centre of the text's celebration of happiness and enjoyment, of artistry and aesthetic appreciation. 'If you did

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not exist', they are told by Gosta Berling, the defrocked minister who is one of their circle and who emerges as the archetype of the Romantic genius, 'then dancing would die, the summer would die, the roses would die, the games of cards would die, singing would die, and throughout the whole of this blessed province there would be nothing but iron and foundry proprietors'.31 The year of the cavaliers turns out to be one of parties and balls and romantic adventures, an exuberant celebration of traditional Varmland culture. Its starting-point is the Christmas-night party in the smithy at Ekeby at which a notorious foundry-owner, dressed up as the Devil, claims to have a contract with the Major's Wife that she must give him the soul of a cavalier every year. The cavaliers conclude their own contract with the Devil; but for all its Faustian overtones, this scene has the qualities of a farce:32 the Devil is no other than the wicked Sintram, his proportions distorted by the fact that the cavaliers are drunk. In similar ways, many of the activities of the cavaliers explore the fine line between make-believe and reality: Lowenborg plays Beethoven on a wooden board; Master Julius takes a tearful and seemingly final farewell of his fellow cavaliers - only to return to them later the same day, as turns out to be his wont; and Gosta Berling, facing the beautiful Marianne Sinclaire in front of an enthusiastic audience, kisses her — but is the kiss part of the sketch they have just enacted or is it not? This emphasis on pretence, which is linked to the mockery surrounding the cavaliers, amounts to a playful questioning of boundaries which contrasts with the boundlessness associated with the Major's Wife. The cavaliers and their activities can be read as a test of some of the central tenets in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Birgitta Holm, who has pointed to the interest in Nietzsche in Sweden in the late 1880s, places special emphasis on his stylistic significance for Gosta Berling's Saga;33 but I view Selma Lagerlof s exploitation of Nietzschean thought as more extensive and more boldly feminist. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had argued that the Greeks, prey to 'the fears and horrors of existence', had had to interpose the Olympians and the myths surrounding them between themselves and these horrors.34 His emphasis was on classical culture, the bedrock of Western civilisation: focusing on ancient Greece, Nietzsche explored the contrary impulses of the Dionysian

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and the Apollinian, showing how these fused in the measured, precise forms of Greek tragedy. But Nietzsche's Dionysian element fades in comparison with the forces of chaos in Varmland, where the untamed rivers and the vast forests pose immediate threats to the very survival of culture. In Selma Lagerlof s novel, culture is safeguarded by the women, while the cavaliers in their comparative superficiality - singing, dancing and playing cards on the very edge of the precipice - amount to a feminist critique of Nietzsche. Thus Selma Lagerlof s text can also be seen to hit out at Nietzsche the misogynist as it explores the activites within this all-male circle, showing the cavaliers to be incapable of sustaining their versions of artistic creativity and aesthetic pleasure. It is no accident that the invention by one of them of an artificial sun - an allusion to Apollo, the sun god - results in a fire that destroys Ekeby. But beyond the short-term reign of the cavaliers the text places the contribution of women; and beyond the excessive antics of the cavaliers we can glimpse the artistic power and control of the woman author of Gosta Berling's Saga. Towards the end of the cavaliers' year of misrule, the plot once more puts the significance of women in the foreground, now chiefly in the figure of Elisabeth Dohna. Her fate has to some extent paralleled that of the Major's Wife: expelled from her home by her husband, Count Dohna, in punishment for her love of Gosta Berling, she has had to fend for herself and the child she is expecting. Her pregnancy can be seen as echoing the significance of the pilgrimage of the Major's Wife. In a highly charged scene Elisabeth Dohna and the Major's Wife have met in the female enclave of a weaving room, where the younger woman's empathy with the older has resulted in a blurring of the generation gap and a merging of the two characters, highlighting not only the transgressive powers of the women but also Elisabeth's future role. As Gosta Berling's wife of a few weeks, she subsequently saves the situation when a mob descends on Ekeby to take revenge on the cavaliers for their neglect of the estate; and with its ritual overtones, the scene in the dark autumn night when the people of the neighbourhood are provided with food and drink in the courtyard develops into a striking contrast to the indulgences of the cavaliers during Christmas night. The make-believe of the cavaliers is undermined by the real concerns and contributions of the text's

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new central female character, and it is Elizabeth Dohna who paves the way for a future free of exuberance and excess, marked instead by hard work and communal responsibility as a framework for art and pleasure. 'It is a great thing not to repeat oneself, Selma Lagerlof once wrote to a friend.35 Her second novel, Antikrists mirakler (The Miracles of Anti-Christ, 1897), explores socialism in a contemporary Sicilian setting, complete with popular traditions, legends and wonder-working saints. By contrast, the short stories in Drottningar i Kungahalla (The Queens of Kungahalla, 1899) are set in Viking-age Kungalv, on the west coast of Sweden, Selma Lagerlof s ambition being to write about the period and the events covered by the medieval Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla, but from the perspective of the women rather than that of the men.36 The short novel Hen Ames penningar (Hen Arne's Hoard, 1904), with which Selma Lagerlof was more satisfied than with any other work,37 uses a similar geographical setting but is located in the sixteenth century. Here masculine and feminine projects are set against each other as a young girl is allotted the task of taking revenge on the men who have murdered the members of her foster-family and robbed the Protestant minister heading the household. The murderers' attempt to build a new existence for themselves is thwarted by the joint efforts of the young girl and the ghost of her foster-sister, the feminine project subverting conventional boundaries and calling patriarchal hierarchies into question. A short novel of remarkable proportions, En hengdrdssdgen (The Tale of a Manor, 1899) is located in the very sphere where boundaries dissolve. The original title, 'Hjarnspanad', 'The Entwining of Brains', highlights the text's preoccupation with the affinity of minds, capable of communicating with no other intermediaries than music and fairytales. One year before Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and two years before August Strindberg's A Dream Play, Selma Lagerlof creates a transgressive universe in which everyday occurrences merge with visions and dreams. At the centre is Ingrid, whose visions and dreams have the effect of making the everyday existence to which she is occasionally restricted, for example in the manse where she lives for a time as the adopted daughter of the minister, seem flat and lifeless. Her true setting is instead the manor of the title, at which she arrives to rescue the son and heir from

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madness. In this fairytale, the princess becomes the saviour of the prince and not the other way round. The princess, moreover, is an artist: the visit to the manor by the bat-like Mrs Sorrow, one of the most memorable creations of Selma Lagerlofs literary imagination, is presented as a vision of Ingrid's; and as her love encourages the re-emergence of the young and handsome student she once knew, she achieves an artistic victory far surpassing the many examples of artistry that pervade this powerful novel. The huge novel Jerusalem (1901-02) is an epic celebration of life in a Swedish farming community and of the emigration of part of this community to the holy city of Jerusalem. The plot has a factual basis: in the summer of 1896, Selma Lagerlof had seen a newspaper item about the emigration of a group of farmers to the Holy City, and, as part of her preparatory work, she had undertaken a journey to Jerusalem and also visited the village in Dalarna in which the emigrants had had their homes. Stylistically, Selma Lagerlofs novel has been inspired by Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson's short stories about Norwegian peasants and, perhaps more conspicuously, by the Icelandic sagas, the prominence of dialogue in Jerusalem making it an innovative "work in the history of the Swedish novel.38 Although the focus on emigration establishes a thematic link with the sagas,39 the inversions of the traditional saga patterns are more consistent and more conspicuous: turning its back on bloody confrontations and extended family feuds, the plot instead embraces peaceful achievements promoting a sense of belonging and international understanding. In remarkably concrete terms, then, Jerusalem focuses on the transgression of boundaries and the ideal of a new unity. This may seem paradoxical in a novel where the thematic cornerstones consist of the Word of God, the interpretation of which has been the subject of more lengthy and intense disputes than any other element of our culture, and the Holy City of Jerusalem, weighted down by versions of itself like no other city on earth. The novel, however, does not force a choice and certainly does not offer any clues to Selma Lagerlofs personal sympathies:40 instead it encompasses all these varieties, the multitude of facets imparting strength and expansiveness to the text. Klara Johanson, a leading critic, was upset by the contemporary preoccupations in Jerusalem;41 and it is true that this novel, with its emphasis on topical issues such as religious revival and emigration,

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differs greatly from much of Selma Lagerlof s previous work. Yet there are obvious parallels with a novel like Costa Berling's Saga, with both texts depicting an upheaval affecting an entire community.42 In Jerusalem, the contrast to this transformation is the traditional life at the Ingmar Farm, highlighted in the famous opening section of the novel. Here the sons have succeeded their fathers since time immemorial, all of them bearing the name of Ingmar Ingmarsson; and each new generation can enjoy both firm foundations and a wealth of experience on the basis of which to learn how to 'walk in the ways of God' and build the customary social status of the male members of the family. The construction of a chapel and the arrival of preachers of many different persuasions shatter the patterns that have moulded this community for centuries. The very symbol of stability is torn apart as the inhabitants of the Ingmar Farm are persuaded by a Swedish-American preacher to emigrate to Jerusalem, the auctioning of the farm and its contents marking the beginning of a new era. Jerusalem places itself in the midst of the religious and demographic changes that were transforming the Sweden in which it was written. The novel highlights the effect of these changes in drawing up new and unexpected boundaries between communities, between families, and between individuals; and as a result Jerusalem gains in significance as the archetypal Christian goal for humankind's striving for unity and fulfilment. According to the preacher whose words have the most far-reaching consequences for the community, the Devil, aiming to jeopardise Christianity, has removed a crucial text from the Bible: 'Those of you who want to lead Christian lives shall turn to your fellow human beings for support'.43 The religious revival that so radically remoulds the community simultaneously serves as a metaphor for humankind's desire for affinity and unity. The novel's most concrete example of the striving for unity stems from the experiences of a female character. Having lost both her children in the sinking of the steamer L'Univers and been close to becoming a victim herself, Mrs Gordon of the United States has heard a heavenly voice call for unity. To this end, she has founded a colony in Jerusalem. The Gordon Colony becomes the home of the Swedish families; and here, again, female characters are prominent. One of these is Karin Ingmarsdotter, whose decision to allow

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the Ingmar Farm to become a focal point of the religious revival precipitated the community into the new era and brought about the emigration to the holy city. Another is Gertrud, who once looked forward to becoming young Ingmar Ingmarsson's wife only to find him choosing, as a result of the auction, the family farm and with it a different bride. A dreamer and a visionary, Gertrud can be seen as epitomising the metaphysical striving of the emigrants. Selma Lagerlof s novel culminates in a reconciliation between the old and the new worlds of the emigrants, with Ingmar Ingmarsson's stay in Jerusalem bridging the gap. On his return from the holy city, he claims to have perceived why 'Our Lord allows kingdoms to collapse and cities to be wrecked and the creations of humankind to be swept away like leaves in the wind'. It is, he explains, a means of ensuring that humanity 'will always have something to construct and the opportunity to show what can be achieved'.44 While Ingmar Ingmarsson is able to apply this insight to his own experience with the farm that he assumed he would inherit but did not, the idea — which Selma Lagerlof also formulated in her correspondence — is given additional weight by the emphasis in the revised version of Jerusalem (1909) on the rebuilding and modernisation of Palestine as a result of a joint international effort. The author once expressed her belief that 'we prepare better for Heaven during our weekdays than on Sundays';45 and in the last instance unity, explored in the context of the sustained unsettling of boundaries in this remarkably pragmatic novel, emerges as a fluid and many-faceted concept, an ideal attainable only in the very process of hard and constructive work. AN AUTHOR OF INTERNATIONAL STATURE

Having consolidated her position with Jerusalem, whose reviewers were comparing her to Homer and Shakespeare,46 Selma Lagerlof found herself a major public figure both abroad and in Sweden. She was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1909; and when she was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1914, she became the first woman ever to join this august society of eighteen members, founded in 1786. At the Congress held by the Women's International Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm in 1911, Selma Lagerlof was one of the leading participants; and Elin Wagner, also an active suffragist, has described how 'wonderful [it

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was] to have on the rostrum a world famous woman author and estate owner who lacked the civic right which the most ordinary male author and farmer possessed by virtue of gender'.47 With Selma Lagerlof s fame, which was unprecedented for a Swedish author, followed not only wide-ranging demands on her time and money - and a boost for tourism in Varmland — but commissions which further confirmed her extraordinary versatility. Nils Holgerssons underbam resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Further Adventures of Nils, 1906-07) was written as a reader for Swedish schoolchildren, its incomparable exposition of the country's geography, history and culture, all seen from the perspective of a boy travelling on the back of a wild goose, becoming popular with readers all over the world. Korkarlen (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness, 1912) resulted from a request by The National Tuberculosis Society, and what began as a short piece grew into a novel.48 With extraordinary vividness, the text explores the border country between life and death as a poor and diseased alcoholic surveys his existence. With the outbreak of the First World War, Selma Lagerlof found her creative powers paralysed, and her pacifist novel Bannlyst (The Outcast) only appeared towards the end of 1918. The work is central to the Swedish tradition of feminist pacifist writing, beginning with Fredrika Bremer and sustained, before and during the First World War, by authors such as Ellen Key (see Chapter 1) and Elin Wagner (see Chapter 4). The origins of The Outcast are complex, and the interpretations have traditionally stressed its major components, the love story and a pacifist novel, arguing that the author has failed to make the two fuse.49 Yet the novel strikes me as functioning as a successful whole, held together by the clarity and freshness of its settings, by the subtle portrayal of its central characters, and by the tension emanating from the concentration on powerful emotions which sometimes emerge unrestrained but which can also be held in perfect yet evocative check. Using a broadly contemporary setting, The Outcast is a novel about nausea: Sven Elversson returns from a polar expedition to a small community on the west coast of Sweden, only to be shunned by its members when they learn that he, along with the other starving participants of the expedition, has tasted human flesh. The

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feelings of disgust aroused by certain foods and by corpses are Julia Kristeva's foremost examples of abjection,50 the phenomenon that recalls the attempts by the very young child to free itself from its semiotic relationship "with the maternal body, a process which is a prerequisite for the establishment of an identity and a language. Abjection, according to Elizabeth Gross, 'testifies to the precarious grasp of the subject on its own identity, an assertion that the subject may slide back into the impure chaos out of which it was formed'.51 In Julia Kristeva's own words, we 'may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity'.52 In an oeuvre which can be seen to be preoccupied with boundaries and their significance, The Outcast, by highlighting a fundamental human borderline, argues the need for a re-examination of the state of modern Western society and emphasises the role of love and an all-encompassing respect for human life. The marginalisation of Sven Elversson parallels that of Jan in Skrolycka, the central character in Kejsarn av Portugallien (The Emperor of Portugallia, 1914): like Sven's cannibalism, Jan's madness results in an outsider position that opens up critical perspectives on society. In The Outcast, society is marked by selfishness and greed, its strict and narrow boundaries safeguarding material gains. Ostracised by this society, Sven Elversson establishes new patterns of belonging and affinity by taking on tasks that others view with contempt, his love, patience and faith in his fellow human beings pointing towards an alternative society. Each in their own way, the two central women characters add to the boundlessness of this new sphere, Lotta Hedman by her visionary powers and gift of conveying the word of God, and Sigrun Rhange, the wife of a minister, by a love and sensibility reaching out for humankind. The relationship between Sven and Sigrun is the focal point of this new sphere, the affinity that blossoms beneath the surface of their conversations calling into question the boundaries that conventionally separate individuals. Their relationship eventually transforms Sigrun's husband; and his concluding speech about 'The Holiness of Life' is a celebration of the boundless sphere from which he has previously excluded himself. The concluding programmatic message makes The Outcast unusual in Selma Lagerlof s oeuvre. The focal point of the minister's speech is a nightmarish description of victims of the Battle of

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Jutland, of corpses floating upright in their life-jackets, their heads nodding and their arms moving in unison with the waves while their eyes are being eaten by gulls. As Sven Elversson is exonerated, the nausea that has shaped his fate and remoulded the society of which he was part is evoked yet again - as a common, instinctive reaction with the potential to prevent war. Warfare, of course, is precisely about defending existing boundaries and drawing up new ones;53 but will the community's nausea, strengthened by the insight into the holiness of life, be powerful enough to challenge warfare in the name of the bigger, universal community? Selma Lagerlof s last major work, the trilogy commonly known as Lo'wenskoldscykeln (The Lowenskold Cycle, 1925-28), moves away from the relative weightiness imparted by huge ethical and moral issues. The plot of the second volume, it has been pointed out, 'resembles a comedy and sometimes even a farce', although it may simultaneously be 'a tragedy at bottom'.54 This kind of lighthearted but fundamental ambiguity seems to me to pervade the trilogy, emphatically frustrating our attempts at a univocal reading. Linda Schenck, translator of the most recent English version of the first volume, has noted how 'Question after question emerges, usually to be answered in at least two apparently mutually exclusive but fully possible ways, leaving the reader uncomfortably uncertain of what he is "supposed" to think'.55 This ambivalence is no less characteristic of the two subsequent volumes; and as I shall show, it has the ultimate effect of clouding with uncertainty the interpretation of much of Selma Lagerlof s oeuvre. The trilogy embraces some strikingly disparate material, and the publication of the first two volumes in the same year is in itself a confirmation of the range of Selma Lagerlof s art.56 The first volume, Lowenskoldska ringen (The Lowenskold Ring, 1925), is at one level a hair-raising ghost story about the consequences of the theft from a grave of the ring which Charles XII, the warrior king, had given to one of his generals. As Selma Lagerlof emphasised, Charlotte Lowenskold (1925) and Anna Svard (1928), on the other hand, are first and foremost psychological studies,57 tracing the fates of some of the descendants of the General during the first half of the nineteenth century. One of these is a young minister, Karl-Artur Ekenstedt, who is engaged to Charlotte Lowenskold but breaks off his engagement to marry a woman pedlar, Anna

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Svard. As he becomes increasingly influenced by a third woman, Karl-Artur loses his grip on his career as well as his marriage and ends up travelling the country with Thea Sundler, preaching at markets from a cart. Selma Lagerlof weaves this extended plot between two poles which, at first sight, would seem to exclude each other. We may prefer to read the tale of the General's ring as a ghost story, but it is equally possible to read it in psychological terms. To take but one example, the belated manhunt for the thief of the ring arranged by the son of the General seems to the participants to be justified by the approving presence of the General's ghost; but their conspicuous anger and aggression, culminating in the arrest of three apparently innocent men, are also explicable in psychological terms, as the result of the son's bad conscience and resentment, magnified and multiplied by a circle of tense and eager men. A parallel duality is achieved in Charlotte Lowenskold and Anna Svard, where odd hints that the characters feel they are losing control of their lives are focused towards the end of the last volume as the possibility of revenge again surfaces. Seen in this light, Karl-Artur Ekenstedt's failures - with their profound consequences for Charlotte Lowenskold and Anna Svard, both of whom turn out to be strong and eminently capable women - could all be the results of the machinations of Thea Sundler as the tool of the woman who once swore to take her revenge on the Lowenskolds. Selma Lagerlof has been sharply criticised for this late and potentially unconvincing re-introduction of the revenge motif.58 The late appearance of the motif, however, results in a wonderfully effective destabilisation of the world of these two novels: both readings become equally possible and seem equally true. It is hardly an accident that The Lowenskold Ring contains one of the most suggestive scenes concerning the role of narrative to be found in a text by Selma Lagerlof, the scene which depicts how the open fire, the games played by those sitting around it and, more particularly, the stories with which they entertain each other, give them 'the will to go on, however difficult and poverty-stricken their lives'.59 This is the triumph of the story for its own sake, a subtle reminder of the power of the medium mastered by a world-famous novelist. We need her stories, but then we also have to accept the challenges of truth merging with fiction and

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of multiple readings that obliterate the conventional patterns to which we normally cling in our lives. The ambivalence that permeates this trilogy acquires a special dimension because the effect can be seen to reach out to many of Selma Lagerlof s earlier works as familiar motifs resurface and are re-written. Vivi Edstrom has singled out Charlotte Lowenskold's 'Sermon to the God of Love', delivered when she is coming to grips with Thea Sundler's love of Karl-Artur,60 as a 'resigned parallel to the passionate hymns to love in Lagerlof s early writing'.61 Perhaps even more striking is the choice of a minister as one of the central characters in two of these volumes: both the minister and the setting recall Go'sta Berling's Saga; while Karl-Artur Ekenstedt's conviction that he is 'walking in the ways of God' emerges as an allusion to Jerusalem. But here the old ideals, central to works which, by the time the trilogy was written, had become classics of Swedish literature, are irreverently skewed and called into question. Karl-Artur is the minister heading for his own ruin, blinded by a lack of self-knowledge and direction in his life. Or is he rather a victim of Thea Sundler and her success in inflating his ego? She, in turn, amounts to another piece of re-writing: against the background of Selma Lagerlof s faith in humankind generally and in the contribution of women in particular, this portrait is almost viciously negative. It deliberately unsettles Selma Lagerlof s fictional universe. At the same time, Thea Sundler can be read as an ingenious modern parallel to the repulsive old General, who himself contributes to undermining the author's previous treatment of the supernatural. Although far from always idyllic and beautiful in the work of Selma Lagerlof, the supernatural has never before been as consistently repugnant as in this trilogy. Triumphant in its assurance and enlivened by an exuberant sense of humour, The Lowenskold Cycle amounts to an almost frivolous display of the range of Selma Lagerlof s art, the text disrespectfully destabilising not only our readings of the trilogy but — retrospectively — much of her oeuvre. And she continued this project in her final book, Dagbok for Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof (The Diary of Selma Lagerlof, 1932), whose depiction of some months in the life of a 14-year-old girl suffering from a hip complaint is so convincing that many readers assumed it to be based on an existing diary. But the account, cleverly capitalising on the

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interest in Freudian thought prevalent in Sweden at the time, has the effect of further distancing the author not only from this text but from all her texts. Particularly interesting is the figure of the student whom the fictitious author of the diary meets on a train — a suggestively unstable and fluid setting — and who becomes the focal point of her fantasies. In a letter, Selma Lagerlof suggests that this student can be read as the prototype for some of her central male figures: Gosta Berling, Gunnar Hede in The Tale of a Manor and Karl-Artur Ekenstedt. And she adds: 'Let's now see if the critics are clever enough to pick this up'.62 The spinster author, whose depictions of men and love had caused considerable speculation throughout her career, here seems to meet the sceptics head on — only to make herself invisible, yet again, behind her fiction. I am convinced that her comment about the critics was made tongue in cheek; and once more our conventional boundaries of interpretation are called into question as the text triumphs. In many respects, the critical exploration of the oeuvre of this author of world renown has only just begun.

4 Elin Wagner (1882-1949) A LIFE OF COMMITMENT

Unlike Fredrika Bremer and Selma Lagerlof, Elin Wagner did not gain a huge international reputation during her life-time, but her novels were widely translated into the other Scandinavian languages and into Finnish, and also, if more sparingly, into French, German, Dutch and even Russian. None of her novels, however, has so far appeared in English. In Sweden Elin Wagner held a position, throughout most of her career, as one of the leading novelists of her generation. The author of about twenty novels and several collections of short stories, she enjoyed positive notices and also achieved some very high sales figures. When she was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1944, as its second woman member ever, she was compared to Selma Lagerlof; and the parallels were reinforced on Elin Wagner's death a few years later. Yet, with the exception of two or three texts, her considerable oeuvre has now been largely forgotten. It is symptomatic that the latest English-language history of Swedish literature, which devotes eight and a half pages to Selma Lagerlof and four to Fredrika Bremer, dispatches Elin Wagner in just two sentences.1 How, then, can this eclipsing of Elin Wagner's fame be explained? Her radical feminism would seem to be one major reason. When her husband from 1910 to 1922, the critic John Landquist, assessed her work shortly after her death, he was at pains to emphasise that those of her novels that could be singled out as significant works of art lacked any trace of feminism.2 By contrast, John Landquist linked the novels displaying a more overt feminist commitment to Elin Wagner's journalism;3 and some critics have preferred to foreground her journalism, either in order to prove that she wrote very few novels of real value,4 or to argue that she was a journalist rather than a novelist.5 As the American critic

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Joanna Russ has pointed out, this latter strategy is commonly used to devalue the work of women writers: she has labelled it 'false categorizing'.6 Elin Wagner's feminism, moreover, is based on the concept of difference. The notion of feminine difference, although central to the thinking of Ellen Key (see Chapter 1) as well as to the international feminist thought that also inspired Elin Wagner, was alien to the tenets of Social Democracy which came to predominate in Sweden from the early 1930s onwards. Here the emphasis was on equality; and the policies introduced since the 1960s in particular, focusing on equality of opportunity and foregrounding the concept of gender roles, have had the effect of making Elin Wagner's stance seem outmoded. In an international context, Elin Wagner's contribution looks very different, and the foresight of her stance becomes conspicuous. It is arguable, too, that Elin Wagner's middle-class background and artistic preoccupation with middle-class characters became drawbacks in Social Democratic Sweden: unlike Elin Wagner, Moa Martinson, a working-class novelist who was a near contemporary, has maintained her great popularity (see Chapter 7). The standard picture of Elin Wagner's work provided by the major handbooks of Swedish literature is a fragmented and confusing one.7 The early novels, coloured as they are by her feminist commitment, are regarded as vivid and witty commentaries on their period. By contrast, a number of texts from the late 1910s onwards are seen to be preoccupied not with feminism but with moral and ethical problems, and among these, it is generally argued, Elin Wagner's novels of more lasting value are to be found. The critics then discern a resurgence of feminism in some of the works of the 1930s, the result being that these are given.scant attention or none at all by authorities such as Erik Hjalmar Linder and, in particular, Gunnar Brandell. Elin Wagner's feminism of the 1930s is. seen to be coupled with a pacifism and an eco-feminism culminating in the extensive essay Vackarklocka (Alarm Clock, 1941). The highlighting of this text in the most recent survey (1989) is indicative of the new interest it has attracted in the environmentally conscious Sweden of the 1980s and 1990s. Feminist critics have begun to modify this picture. My survey in this chapter is based on my own research, which has focused

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on Elin Wagner's novels.8 However, the range and variety of her work is significant: like Selma Lagerlof, Elin Wagner is difficult to pigeonhole, a writer who is forever making new and unexpected demands on her readers. And her texts, which range from novels, articles, short stories and essays to her in-depth study of the province of Smaland and her two-volume biography of Selma Lagerlof,9 are left to speak for themselves: unlike her British contemporary, Virginia Woolf, Elin Wagner shunned aesthetic discussions. Elin Wagner was born in 1882 in Lund in the south of Sweden. Her father was a headmaster and her mother — who died when Elin was only three years old — was the daughter of a minister from the province of Smaland. Elin Wagner attended a girls' school of the type in which Selma Lagerlof was teaching in Landskrona, but left without having completed her education. She began her career as a journalist before she was twenty, and from the local paper she advanced to Idun, a quality women's weekly, and to the national liberal daily Dagens Nyheter. She soon became involved in the women's suffrage movement. The approach of the movement in Sweden -was peaceful, but Elin Wagner, unusually, sympathised not so much with the suffragists in Britain as with the suffragettes, who were advocating violence. The Women's International Congress at the Hague in the spring of 1915, which she attended as a journalist, contributed to a decisive shift in her perspective, the experience initiating the feminist pacifist commitment that was to inform much of her subsequent output. This commitment was also reflected in practical contributions to peace, such as her travels, as a member of a commission, in the occupied Rhineland in the early 1920s (as part of this effort, she spent several months in London, working to alert politicians and Church dignitaries to the dangers arising from the occupation); and her campaign to persuade Swedish women to refuse to support militarism in the mid-1930s. Once women in Sweden had been granted the vote in 1919, Elin Wagner worked to channel and augment the influence of the country's new citizens. She belonged to the group of women who founded, in 1923, the radical women's weekly Tidevarvet (The Epoch).10 In Tidevarvet, which she also edited for several years, she

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specialised in Swedish politics and foreign affairs. She was also one of the founders of the Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad, an independent college which aimed to provide Sweden's newly enfranchised women with the skills they needed to take on their new civic commitments. Elin Wagner had been making a living from her fiction since 1916. At times her output was impressive with, for example, two novels in 1919 and one book per year from 1920 to 1924. In the second half of the 1920s, a literary prize enabled her to build a house in Smaland, the province where she had spent her summers as a child; and as well as giving a new impetus to her writing, this provincial base was to offer some much-needed stability and support as the international situation turned increasingly bleak. The Second World War stifled Elin Wagner's ability to write fiction; but during these years she produced both Alarm Clock and the biography of Selma Lagerlof which, each in their own way, are characterised by innovative approaches. She also embarked on a study of Fredrika Bremer, but at the time of her death in 1949 this was little more than a sketch.11 FROM INTERTEXT TO MATRIARCHAL MYTH

The group of male Swedish novelists who made their breakthrough around 1910 were realists, chronicling a rapidly changing society from a critical perspective generally regarded as having been influenced by August Strindberg's writings of the 1880s. Elin Wagner has been seen as contributing the female angle by depicting the new professional woman, with novels such as Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang, 1908) focusing on women office workers, Pennskaftet (Penwoman, 1910)12 on a woman journalist, and Helga Wisbeck (1913) on a woman doctor. However, not only are Elin Wagner's early novels more complex than has been observed hitherto, but they also amount to a much more highly charged relationship with the texts of August Strindberg. I shall take Penwoman as my example. This novel, which may have been inspired by Elizabeth Robins's play Votes for Women! (1907),13 offers a unique close-up of the struggle for women's suffrage in Sweden, depicting the office drudgery as well as the public meetings and celebrating the sense of sisterhood and boundless optimism. The implications of votes

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for women are personified by the young woman journalist, who combines wit with social criticism and whose independence and sense of integrity are pointers to a brighter future. Penwoman, however, also amounts to a mapping out of the conditions of love in patriarchal society; against this background, votes and a greater influence for women emerge as means of improving the conditions of love and thus transforming society. This mapping out takes for its starting-point a text by August Strindberg. Inevitably, his well-known misogyny is one of the targets of Elin Wagner's attack, but the pessimism and determinism of his text are no less important. The fact that Elin Wagner has undertaken a feminist re-writing of a text by August Strindberg has not previously been observed. Penwoman foregrounds women's words, the journalist who is its central character admitting, moreover, that her ambition is to become an author.14 In 1907, August Strindberg had published a novella called Taklagsol (The Topping Out Party), which foregrounds the words of a male character. The text is the monologue of a man who is dying as the result of an accident, his brain that is playing back his experiences being compared to the early version of the gramophone known as the phonograph.15 The pattern that is being unravelled, in other words, is predetermined. It also turns out to be coloured through and through by selfishness, suspicion, jealousy and hatred. While August Strindberg's text depicts a lonely man who is preparing for death by surveying the frustrations of his existence, Elin Wagner's novel revolves around a sisterhood that incarnates life and the future. Exploiting the room, which in The Topping Out Party is a symbol of statutory ownership and male control, Elin Wagner's text opens up very different implications. In the warm and supportive atmosphere of the flat acquired by Penwoman's friend Cecilia, the study assumes the proportions of a unique space for female creativity;16 and as Penwoman and the architect with whom she is living go to spend the summer in the archipelago, just like August Strindberg's couple, the contrasting implications of the room symbolism are enhanced. In The Topping Out Party, the paradisical summer scene is ruined by the arrival of relatives whom the narrator detests, his wife soon succumbing to the invaders and the narrator having to flee from the summer cottage. In Penwoman,

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the couple's idyllic life is similarly threatened, at least in the eyes of the architect, by the arrival of neighbours: in a triumphant challenge to August Strindberg, the neighbours turn out to consist of a gathering of suffragists, about to prepare for the forthcoming general election. But in Elin Wagner's novel there is not only peaceful coexistence but also co-operation, with the architect supporting Penwoman's work for the suffrage movement. And it is significant that the plot of the novel gradually breaks out of the confines of the rooms, the climax being the suffragists' election celebrations in a public square in Stockholm. The successes of the candidates supporting votes for women are suggestive of major social change; but via its revision of the text by her male colleague, Elin Wagner's novel also succeeds in pointing up the role of love, of love of the kind that can accommodate feminine self-realisation, in sustaining this social transformation. Penwoman's architect friend describes to her the building of their home, a process during which they shall 'rejoice together at every inch'; and he continues: I want to raise the roof timbers and put the wreath at the top myself, but it will have been made by you. [ . . . ] And every evening, you will come with me, and we shall see it become more and more ready for people to live in, for you and me, and it will be the best house ever built.17 While the reference to the wreath traditionally placed at the top of a new building directly recalls the ceremony which concludes August Strindberg's text and has given it its title, the implications unmistakably subvert the Strindbergian symbolism. The vision of the house in which Penwoman is going to live with her architect evolves into a token of the expansiveness of their joint future in an era breaking free of the shackles of patriarchal society. Enterprising though it is, Penwoman offers little beyond the reverse of the Strindbergian pessimism and determinism: when Penwoman indulges in writing her self — 'if I wrote like this always, there probably would not be a single Stockholm editor who would want to use me'18 - we are not told what her text contains. It is in the context of Elin Wagner's feminist pacifism that the gendered specifity of her texts is more fully developed. Sla'ktenjerneploogsframgang (The Pvise of the House ofJerneploog,

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1916) highlights ideological confrontations magnified by the war. The central conflict is waged between the militaristic county governor of a Swedish town and his sympathisers on the one hand, and Ingar Gunnarson, a grocer and local politician, with a dwindling band of pacifist followers, on the other. Her grocer's shop tantamount to an enlarged home, Ingar Gunnarson can be seen to extend Ellen Key's ideal of social motherliness (see Chapter 1) via her political commitment. At one level, the novel can be read as a test of Ellen Key's ideals in a world ravaged by war. The outcome is negative: the Jerneploogs win over Ingar's supporters, and their teenage daughter persuades Ingar's son to do his military service which results in his death. The power of the patriarchal system, enlarged by the war, is seen to render social motherliness hopelessly ineffective. Although there are points of agreement between Ellen Key and Elin Wagner, notably their emphasis on women's difference, Elin Wagner remained convinced that her older colleague was seriously underestimating the impact of the patriarchal system.19 In The Rise of the House qfjerneploog, the discourse highlights the dimensions of the central mother figure as she stands in her shop, surrounded by foods and spices from all over the world. She becomes the Great Mother, the symbolism opening up radically new perspectives on the prevailing system. Elin Wagner had encountered the notion of a matriarchal past in works by the Austrian Rosa Mayreder and, perhaps more importantly, the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The latter's The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911) is dedicated to the sociologist Lester F. Ward, whose argument that a superior matriarchal system had preceded the patriarchal one was inspired by Johann Jakob Bachofen's famous Das Mutterrecht (1861).20 With the First World War having confirmed 'the bankruptcy of the man-made world' — a phrase used by the Hungarian feminist pacifist Rosika Schwimmer and taken up by Elin Wagner21 - the myths and rituals suggestive of an original matriarchal system were becoming increasingly indispensable to her art. They make for a major divergence from the conventional modernist use of myth: while T. S. Eliot defined the 'mythical method' as 'a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy, which is contemporary

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history',22 Elin Wagner's exploitation of myth and ritual amounts to an incisive critique of contemporary history. Thus Asa-Hanna (1918), commonly regarded as her greatest novel, would be inconceivable without the author's matriarchal perspective. Set in nineteenth-century Smaland, Asa-Hanna is the story of a righteous peasant girl who marries into a family of criminals and is overwhelmed by their dark secrets until she is eventually able to tell the truth to the outside world. The critics have traditionally focused on Asa-Hanna's private plight - but this arises as a result of social and ideological patterns which derive both their angle and their cutting edge from Elin Wagner's matriarchal awareness. The first of Elin Wagner's novels to abandon the contemporary urban setting, Asa-Hanna achieves a density and a depth unequalled in the author's previous works. The narrative is a tribute to her preference for showing rather than telling, the skilful use of dialect enhancing the precision of the text. The surface realism, however, also offers scope for extensive symbolism. The most consistent symbolism is derived from the Bible; indeed this novel, which is divided into two parts, which opens with the tale of a snake terrorising people in a market place and which contains, in one of its concluding chapters, a vision of the heavenly city of Jerusalem, exploits the very structure of the Bible, and more particularly the contrast between the Old Testament and the New Testament.23 The conscious use of the Bible is linked to the prominence in the text of the Swedish Lutheran Church and its values, assigning women to the conventional roles of housewife, wife and mother; in his Catechism, which Swedish children traditionally had to learn by heart, Luther also highlights some of St. Paul's admonitions to wives on the importance of obedience to their husbands. Moulded by her Lutheran upbringing, Asa-Hanna is one of these typical wives, the faithful member of a Church which, as it turns out, does not hesitate to abandon her into the hands of a criminal. The novel can be read as a scathing critique of the role of the Church in reinforcing the patriarchal system, with more tentative pointers to the connections between the Church and militarism. The narrative unveils a brutal world of power politics and unrestrained selfishness, infinitely remote from the New Testament gospel of love. Yet it is love that inspires Asa-Hanna's eventual rebellion.

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Perceiving the danger that is threatening a childhood friend, she breaks her silence to warn him, and the final chapters can be read as a celebration of the significance of a woman's words. In the context of the novel's Biblical-Lutheran symbolism the emphasis is a crucial one, reiterating also one of the central themes of Fredrika Bremer's Hertha (see Chapter 2): at the time when Asa-Hanna appeared, the resistance to the introduction of women priests was solid in the Swedish Church and was to remain so for many decades. In a revealing yet hilarious scene, Asa-Hanna attempts to tell the truth to the chief constable, only to find that she is not being taken seriously. In the context of the novel's Biblical pattern, this is in fact the Last Judgement, the female sinner having to strive to persuade the male representative of the law of her guilt. In a world where Christ is confined to a wall in the vicarage where he is pictured knocking in vain on a door, it is a woman, rising out of oppression and silence, who initiates the task of putting the message of the New Testament into practice. Using a milieu that is in part very similar to that of Asa-Hanna, Den namnlosa (The Anonymous Woman, 1922) sets off important new developments. Here events are located, almost exclusively, inside a Smaland vicarage, and the characters include a minister who is stern and aloof; his son, a medical student who has become mentally ill after working in a wartime German hospital; and the minister's alienated and unhappy wife. But although these characters are seen in a critical light, as the representative and the victims, respectively, of a patriarchal system, the overall tone is controlled and almost subdued, with the ideological critique focused in terms of a far-reaching mythical pattern. The novel is narrated in the first person by the minister's sister who purports to be the fictitious author of the text. Elin Wagner's oeuvre contains a number of examples of novels of this type, some of them straightforward diary novels but all of them foregrounding a woman's word - as Penwoman and Asa-Hanna also do - and marking out the difference of the space claimed by the female narrator. Set as it is in the Lutheran vicarage, Rakel's narrative, by implication, amounts to a subversive act. Elin Wagner's female narrators each have a distinctive voice. Describing herself as 'a fattish and somewhat silly female relative',24 Rakel is generous with her comments and interpretations but is

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occasionally led astray by her opinionated attitude. Her erroneous conclusions serve as implicit exhortations to the reader to scrutinise the patterns beneath the surface of her narrative. Rakel returns to the vicarage after fourteen years, having spent much of this time abroad. Her encounter with her relatives and the once familiar environment is inevitably coloured by memories. Part of her narrative, moreover, is explicitly analeptic, with sections or whole chapters looking back over a spell of time. This focus on memories can be read as a pointer to the submerged, collective memories that make up the novel's mythical pattern. While it is generally accepted that the thinking of Henri Bergson, and notably his ideas on the free will and the free act, exerted a major influence on several of the male Swedish novelists whose work began to appear around 1910, the impact of Bergson on Elin Wagner's fiction has not been noted previously.25 Yet she had unique opportunities to study the French philosopher: John Landquist, her husband from 1910 to 1922, spearheaded the introduction of his ideas in Sweden. The premises on "which Elin Wagner approached these ideas, however, were markedly different from those of her male colleagues. While they found in Bergson an antidote to the principally Schopenhauerian pessimism that had overshadowed much of Swedish literature in the first decade of the twentieth century, Elin Wagner had found this antidote in her feminist commitment. But her preoccupation with the significance of a matriarchal past gave new dimensions to the Bergsonian concept of la duree and, more especially, to the notion of the role of past experiences in moulding the soul. While Elin Wagner, as far as I have been able to find, did not comment on her dependence on Bergson in any of her published texts, her close friend Emilia Fogelklou (see Chapter 1) offers an invaluable example of a woman's interpretation of Bergson around the time when The Anonymous Woman was written. In a speech entitled 'Det forgangna lever' ('The Past is Present'), delivered in 1917 but not published until 1931, Emilia Fogelklou expands on the implications of the Bergsonian view: Everything we do depends on who we are. And what are we but our entire history so far condensed, with its struggles and

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The second of these paragraphs encapsulates the programme which can be discerned in Elin Wagner's fiction from around 1920 onwards. By recalling, at the level of symbolism, the memories of a matriarchal past, her texts highlight the impact of the patriarchal system and point the way towards a more harmonious future based on equality and self-realisation. Nor is the influence of Bergson confined to her fiction: the biography of Selma Lagerlof, which emphasises her colleague's dependence on memories reaching back to a pre-patriarchal era, is a prime example of Elin Wagner's application of Bergsonian thought.27 In The Anonymous Woman, the mythical pattern unveiled by Rakel's narrative focuses on the Mother and her Daughter. Rakel has arrived at the vicarage with a young woman whom she has met on the train, the anonymous woman of the title of the novel, maltreated by society and mortally ill. She is suffering from the effects of rape; and alongside Rakel, who assumes the proportions of a mother figure, she becomes Core, daughter of the corn goddess Demeter. Robert Graves has pointed out that Hades's rape of Core 'forms part of the myth in which the Hellenic trinity of gods forcibly marry the pre-Hellenic Triple-goddess';28 it can be seen, in other words, as marking the transition from a matriarchal system to a patriarchal one. In the myth, however, Hades is persuaded by Demeter to allow Core to return to her every spring, or the earth would no longer blossom and bear fruit. For the anonymous woman in the novel there is no such escape. And yet the miracle occurs: before she dies, she has begun to transform the vicarage, her love inspiring a rudimentary bridge across the chasm separating the minister and his wife and, most importantly, inspiring the sick son to seek help. In a remarkable challenge to the patriarchal system that has been stifling and distorting life in the vicarage, the text confronts the Father and his Son with the Mother and her Daughter. The result is the demolition of the prevailing system from within.

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LATER WORKS

In Elin Wagner's output novels mingle with short stories, but as I have indicated, she also explored other genres. Having written film scripts early in her career, she attempted a stage play in 1922, transforming it into a novel when it was turned down by a Stockholm theatre. Her radio plays were more successful, seven of them being broadcast during the 1930s.29 Several of her novels were turned into films, among them Asa-Hanna, and Elin Wagner was closely involved in these projects. Tusen ar i Smdland (A Thousand Years in Smaland, 1939), her personal account of the history, geography and culture of the part of Sweden where she lived, with an angle on contemporary environmental issues, is part of these efforts to expand the space available to her, as are Alarm Clock and the biography of Selma Lagerlof. To these many-faceted texts we need to add her journalism, a distinctive space which she nurtured throughout her career. Referring to her leading articles in Tidevarvet, the writer and critic Ivar Harrie has characterised her as 'one of Sweden's great columnists', outstanding in her 'wit, pathos and singleness of mind, unique in her combination of sparkling irony at her own expense and meditative depth'.30 Combining vast perspectives with a distinct personal angle, her articles reflect a consistent, deeply experienced world view, indicative, ultimately, of the religious conviction that underlies all her work. Elin Wagner's novel of 1932, Dialogenfortsatter (The Dialogue is Continuing), has traditionally been linked to Tidevarvet: focusing on abortion legislation, maternity provision, the falling birth-rate, rearmament and the threat of war, the novel exploits material similar to that which preoccupied Tidevarvet at the time. But the novel consistently brings out the connections between these issues, highlighting the effects of the marginalisation of women, as the patriarchal system, yet again, is seen to be sliding towards war. The Dialogue is Continuing is the product of an era of increasingly ominous political developments, its sharper tone pointing to the urgency of the issues. What has not been observed before, however, is that the narrative ingeniously combines these topical problems with mythical patterns in terms that reinforce and universalise its critique of the patriarchal system. Although highlighting women's words, via the characters of a woman journalist and a woman who becomes a member of the

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Swedish Parliament, The Dialogue is Continuing is narrated in the third person, without recourse to memory strategies of the type used in The Anonymous Woman. Yet memories turn out to be crucial here too, especially in the opening section of the novel, and again the exploitation of mythical patterns needs to be seen in the light of Elin Wagner's Bergsonian thinking. Against the text's most powerful father-figure, a Conservative Member of Parliament and banker, the plot thus sets his wife. She is the mother of a son who has died and been succeeded by a second son, but also the mother of a daughter and - once husband and wife have separated and he has taken charge of the children — the mother who comes face to face with the implications of militarism and rearmament. Stina Ek personifies the mythical mother through many different transformations, from Mary, the Mother of Christ, via Demeter, the Mother of Core, to the Great Mother — the last of these symbolised by her profession as a market gardener, attuned to the needs of the earth. Her former husband, at the opposite extreme, assumes the proportions of an Olympian Zeus. I read this mythical pattern underlying the depiction of Swedish everyday life in the early 1930s as an ingenious literary exploitation of two famous works by the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, both of which explore issues at the heart of Elin Wagner's thinking. In Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Jane Ellen Harrison contrasts the matriarchal fertility deities with the Olympians, whom she was subsequently to describe as 'a bouquet of cut-flowers whose bloom is brief, because they have been severed from their roots'.31 She also points up the matriarchal origins of the worship of Dionysos, his latter-day equivalent in The Dialogue is Continuing .being a rich and lascivious old man who finances frescoes of the Mother and Child in the Swedish Parliament building. The depiction in Prolegomena of the Orpheus cult as a revival of the matriarchal mysteries has, I believe, inspired the preoccupations of the artist in Elin Wagner's novel. It seems likely that a combination of feminist interests and familiarity with British culture had resulted in Elin Wagner's discovery of Jane Ellen Harrison, probably in the 1920s. Prolegomena also helps to shed light on the woman journalist in The Dialogue is Continuing who finds herself 'placed by fate in a corridor between two worlds',32 and whose research into women's past never results

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in any affinity with the roots she uncovers. She is Athena, the goddess whose birth from the head of Zeus is described by Jane Ellen Harrison as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born Kore of her matriarchal condition'.33 Despite having access to words, Marta Cronberger remains a prisoner of the patriarchal system. In my analysis, then, the mythical patterns from Harrison's Prolegomena help to bring out the distortions characterising the patriarchal world of the early 1930s. But the novel goes further and explores, in the context of a series of meetings, the reasons why the world is out of joint. The meetings can be seen to be inspired by Jane Ellen Harrison's subsequent and possibly even better-known work, Themis: A Study of the Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Influenced by Emile Durkheim as well as Bergson, she here explores the significance of the group centred on the mother, concluding that Themis, the goddess of divine justice, is 'the very spirit of the assembly incarnate'.34 The social structure, in other words, is based on the mother-centred group. In one of the best-known chapters in The Dialogue is Continuing., a group of local politicians attempt to streamline maternity care without consulting the women. The climax of the novel is a debate in the Swedish Parliament, the symbol of all that which Themis stands for; but when Stina Ek, in her first and last speech as an MP, demands 'a world into which women dare to bring their children',35 the Chamber is almost empty and Parliament is about to be dissolved. This concluding focus on a parliamentary meeting and a woman's words thus has the effect of redirecting the spotlight on to the totality of the multi-dimensional and subversive text of this dazzlingly bold but neglected novel. Genomskddad (Unmasked, 1937) and Hemlighetsfull (Secretive, 1938) were written as parts of a trilogy, but the outbreak of war prevented Elin Wagner from completing the third volume. The two novels are superb examples of the author's ability to exploit topical issues and literary forms as the foundations of vast and poignantly critical perspectives. 'My plan', Elin Wagner wrote to Emilia Fogelklou with reference to her projected trilogy, 'would be to try to summarise and offer in a popular, romanticised form the new ideology that the new feminism requires'.36

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Swedish literature in the 1930s was dominated by autobiographical fiction, a generation of emerging working-class authors depicting their backgrounds and themselves, not least in the light of the findings of Freud. Moa Martinson's trilogy about Mia is the prime example of this type of fiction written by a woman (see Chapter 7). Elin Wagner's two novels draw on the autobiographical genre to project a concept of Freud which, while exploiting a few of his central discoveries, pinpoints his thinking overall as a profoundly negative reflection of the patriarchal system. The autobiographical genre neatly accommodates Elin Wagner's predilection for the first-person narrator who is also the fictitious author of the text; and just as in The Anonymous Woman, the focus on the author's memories makes for a narrative of such chronological complexity that it becomes charged with significance. Chronicling her confused life, Agnes makes a clear distinction between her one-time ignorance and her subsequent feminist commitment. The narrator's 'now', in other words, is distinguished from the 'then' of the narrative; and again there is a further, more distant chronological level discernible beneath these two. But in contrast to the complex mythical pattern in The Dialogue is Continuing, the submerged pattern in Unmasked and Secretive is instantly familiar. Stressing the possibility that she was mixed up with another baby in the hospital where she was born, Agnes introduces herself as a changeling, her alienation deepened by the refusal of her wealthy father to acknowledge her. Agnes's twentieth-century world contains a strand from the fairytale, a rhythm which instils in the reader the conviction that her confused situation will eventually be sorted out. There can be little doubt that the findings of psychoanalysis have inspired Elin Wagner's use of the fairytale in Unmasked and Secretive; but with regard to its implications, the pattern here would seem to be more dependent on a different source. In 1897 the English scholar Karl Pearson had pointed to the reflections of a matriarchal past in the tales of the Brothers Grimm, discerning in these tales 'a people with a primitive agriculture, chiefly conducted by women; a people to whom the witch and wise woman, rather than the priest and knight, were the guides and instructors in life'.37 Matriarchal dimensions consistently inform the fairytale pattern in these two novels. In a

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world on the verge of war, they highlight the extent and affinity of the human community. The experiences of Agnes help to pinpoint the critique of Freud as a representative of the patriarchal system. Her marriage, at a very young age, to the man who is her guardian, can be read as a version of female sexual development according to Freud, with Agnes falling in love with a father figure. When she eventually finds the fairytale prince, he turns out to be a caricature of modern, Freudian man: weak-willed and indecisive, Kristian is unable to commit himself to their relationship and has to seek psychoanalytical help. The title of the first novel can be read as an ironic reference to Freud's 'unmasking' of women in general and of female sexuality in particular. The second volume offers the antithesis. Following Kristian to the Alpine hospital where he is undergoing psychoanalysis, Agnes finds herself in a setting where patients with mental problems, notably victims of the war, are restored to normality only to be sent back into the world that has destroyed them. Her body protests, her haemorrhage signifying the potential of the contribution by women which the prevailing system so emphatically ignores. The incident transforms her from an object into a subject, and she gradually embarks on a career as a foreign correspondent. Her continental travels contrast the ravages of the First World War with the reconstruction initiated by the great women figures she encounters. Ultimately, Agnes's narrative becomes part of this reconstruction, her words integral to the foundation of a new world. With its opening section on the matriarchal dimensions of ancient cultures, including Greece and Crete, Alarm Clock (1941) may provide some clues to the types of material that might have been included in the projected third volume of the trilogy. Alarm Clock had been preceded by Fred med jorden (Peace with Earth, 1940), which had Elin Wagner and her landowner and farmer friend Elisabeth Tamm as its joint authors. This volume had grown from the realisation that major issues concerning peace, land use, health, the demographic crisis and education could not be treated separately: 'All of them are integral to a re-evaluation of humankind's relation to Mother Earth, to life and to reality, which means a change of system with all that this entails in terms of social transformation'.38 'Our earth needs women' is a slogan at the core

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of the ecological message of Peace with Earth; and in Alarm Clock this message is developed in a more elaborate context. In many respects, Alarm Clock amounts to an explicit statement of themes and ideas that had pervaded Elin Wagner's novels for decades, the new world war necessitating a more outspoken approach. Her aim is to encourage women to examine their situation; and to this end she radically remoulds the conventional form of the essay. The narrator embarks on dialogues with doubtful readers, important points are highlighted by italics or presented in the form of lists, the numerous quotations cover the entire range from political speeches to poetry, and the personal vignettes studding the tqxt are almost invariably imbued with symbolic dimensions. Alarm Clock is a notable example of a woman's text challenging and reshaping an established genre. Starting in the matriarchal era, Alarm Clock makes a powerful case for the importance of women's history, for establishing herstory alongside history to enable women to grasp their identity and their situation in a patriarchal system that has again degenerated into a world war. Only on this basis, the text argues, can women and men hope to build a better and more balanced future together. Scrutinising the consequences of the transition to a patriarchal system in a Swedish context, Alarm Clock pays particular attention to the modern disdain for pre-industrial conditions, one example being the slogan used on the Swedish pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937: 'Humankind was tied to the earth until liberated by science'.39 The scepticism, throughout the essay, of wholesale mechanisation in the name of progress can be read as a reflection of Sweden's late but rapid industrialisation, with Elin Wagner's linkage of the domination of nature and the domination of women anticipating modern eco-feminism. And the narrator's account of what she and some like-minded friends understand by a high standard of living beautifully brings out the connections between pacifism and eco-feminism as it pinpoints concerns which have become central in the 1980s and 1990s, the demands for clean water, good bread and food, clean air and satisfying work, carried out in harmony with other human beings, all presupposing and contributing to peace on earth. In some respects a Swedish equivalent of Virginia Woolf s Three

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Guineas (1938), Alarm Clock, however, was not a success. It would be nice to think that the rediscovery of the text in the 1970s and 1980s might be a pointer to a renaissance for Elin Wagner's oeuvre in its entirety. After all it was she who underlined, with reference to Selma Lagerlof, that 'The fate of a work of art is not decided at its first encounter with humankind. It may have to wander widely through the world before it reaches the time for which it was created'.40

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PART II 1919-1961

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5 Consolidation TOWARDS THE MODERN WELFARE STATE

The quarter century from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War was a period of profound change in Sweden, both economically and politically. Industrialisation was rapidly gathering pace, preparing the ground for the country's exceptional economic growth during the decades after the Second World War. Politically, the period following the late introduction of parliamentarism was characterised by a series of minority governments; but the Social Democratic election victory of 1932 introduced an era of Social Democratic rule that was to last for 44 years, the unprecedented stability in combination with economic progress providing the foundations for the modern welfare state. Sweden's first Social Democratic Government, headed by Hjalmar Branting, had come to power in 1920, the first socialist government to be established anywhere in the world by peaceful and democratic means rather than by a revolution.1 It was short-lived, but the 1921 election to the Second Chamber, boosted by a reform which permitted well over half of the country's population to vote - including, for the first time, women - as opposed to merely one fifth in 1920,2 gave the Social Democrats a considerably broader power base. The 1920s, however, were characterised by a succession of minority governments, none of them capable of presenting long-term strategies or tackling controversial issues.3 The 1932 Election to the Second Chamber took place against the background of the Depression. Moreover, in the spring of 1931, four demonstrators and one spectator had been shot dead in Adalen, in the north of the country, after soldiers had been called in to control a political protest. In the context of the Swedish tradition of consensus and compromise this was — and remains — an exceptional event. The suicide of the business tycoon Ivar Kreuger, which occurred about a year after the events in Adalen, similarly

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shook the nation. In this climate of political as well as economic uncertainty, fuelled also by the rise of fascism on the Continent, the economic recovery programme of the Social Democrats held out the prospect of a stable democracy and a rise in prosperity. The architect of the programme, Ernst Wigforss, abandoned Marx and designed an economic strategy underpinned by the thinking of J. M. Keynes. The overriding goal was full employment, with Wigforss advocating meaningful jobs at market wages. The new Social Democratic Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, had outlined his vision of the folkhem or the 'home of the people' as early as 1928, although he needed the support of the Agrarian Party to begin to put his ideas into practice. The famous Saltsjobaden agreement of 1938 added to the economic and political stability by regulating relations between trades unions and employers. After Sweden's late introduction of universal suffrage, improvements to the situation of women remained slow and piecemeal. While reforms during the second half of the nineteenth century had opened up a number of careers to women, public service posts only became accessible in 1925. Posts in the judiciary and the ministry remained beyond the reach of women, the former until 1933 and the latter until 1958; and inequalities persisted with regard to pay and pension rights.4 A school reform in 1927 finally opened the state secondary schools to women; previously, private schools had offered the only route to higher education. Sweden was slightly more advanced with regard to marriage legislation, with the Marriage Code of 1921, which had been drafted on a joint Scandinavian basis,5 laying down the equal responsibilities of husband and wife with regard to the finances of the home and the bringing up of children. Swedish women trying to consolidate and strengthen their position in the labour market faced new problems as a result of the country's demographic trends. An unprecedented drop in the birth-rate was highlighted in a book by Gunnar and Alva Myrdal,6 and women came under pressure to return to their traditional roles as mothers and housewives. But the commission set up to tackle the demographic crisis advocated a compromise solution: as Alva Myrdal has put it, 'The old debate on married women's right to work was turned into a fight for the working woman's right to marry and have children'.7 Measures were introduced to iron out

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the financial disadvantages of families with children, with maternity benefit being paid from 1938. Legislation that came into force the following year made it illegal to dismiss women because of marriage or pregnancy. In the long term, and viewed from a more radical perspective, however, the element of compromise faded while the emphasis on motherhood became increasingly conspicuous; and to a leading Swedish left-wing historian there is no doubt that the measures introduced during the second half of the 1930s and the thinking that inspired them had the effect of making Swedish women's struggle for financial independence grind to a halt.8 It is significant that the foreign interest in Sweden which became apparent in the second half of the 1930s in no way focused on the situation of women. One of the most famous studies, the American journalist Marquis Childs's Sweden: The Middle Way (1936), preferred to highlight the more obvious economic and political changes, praising Sweden as the country where compromise and consensus had brought Utopia within reach. Marquis Childs discerned in Swedish society a certain wholeness, a certain health, that is rare in the present period. It is a machine civilization; there are proportionately more telephones, more electrical devices, more motor cars in Stockholm than in any other European city; the rural areas are more completely electrified than anywhere else in the world, unless perhaps it be certain cantons in Switzerland. But the machine is not the master. From the past there has been preserved, if only in symbol, the pledge of man's ancient debt to earth and sea; his dependence upon elemental forms of production, the fertility of the soil and the fecundity of animals.9 This enthusiasm, which clearly needs to be seen in the context of the international political situation, centred on the strategies designed to control capitalism, Marquis Childs's 'middle way' first and foremost being Sweden's happy mean between capitalism and communism. In his analysis, this balance had been achieved thanks to the roles played by consumer co-operatives, influential trade unions, and efficient state ownership.10 The growing international interest in Sweden was hardly paralleled by a growing Swedish interest in the outside world. During

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the inter-war years, no foreign policy issues appeared in party manifestos or election campaigns.11 The fact that Sweden had been a member of the League of Nations since its inception in 1920, with Hjalmar Branting as a highly committed delegate, had not contributed to raising the international awareness of its citizens; and the kind of international consciousness that we have seen reflected in the work of an author such as Elin Wagner remained rare. Hjalmar Branting, who regarded the League of Nations as enabling the smaller states to assert their independence against more powerful neighbours, represents the strong pacifist strand characteristic of Swedish Social Democracy during the 1920s. Military spending was reduced, a policy that was only slowly reversed during the 1930s. Thus Sweden lacked both trained soldiers and military equipment when the Second World War broke out. Having turned down a German offer of a treaty of non-aggression earlier in 1939, Sweden now declared itself neutral and a wartime coalition government was appointed. However, from the summer of 1940, a few months after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, and up to the latter part of 1942, when Hitler's fortunes began to change, Sweden was totally dependent on Germany in both economic and military terms.12 The many concessions to German demands were heavily criticised in certain newspapers and journals. Heading the attack was Torgny Segerstedt, editor of Goteborgs Handels-och Sjofartstidning. MODERNISM AND WORKING-CLASS WRITING

During the quarter century with which we are concerned here, there are significant shifts in terms of cultural production and consumption. With the Swedish literary public sphere, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, still based on state and church officials and a small number of highly significant critics,13 many of the new writers, chiefly modernists and working-class authors, had to rely on alternative, non-establishment forums for the publication of their work. The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of a number of new, often radical, literary and more broadly cultural journals; and the press established by the trade union movement, by the cooperative movement and by feminists (Tidevarvet; see Chapter 4) provided further challenges to the dominant ideology. The growing prominence of women writers who, as we shall

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see, included modernists as well as working-class authors, added considerably to the destabilisation of established patterns. A study of Swedish women writers in the period 1900—1950 has pinpointed a particularly steep rise in the number of women publishing their first work during the first and second decades of the century (a rise of 92 per cent in 1910-19 compared to 1900-09), but has also emphasised the remarkable increase in the number of active women writers throughout the 50-year period: while there had been around 200 of these between 1900 and 1909, the figure rose to well over 700 for the decade 1940-49.14 These figures include Selma Lagerlof, active into the 1930s, and Elin Wagner, whose last novel appeared in 1947. Literary modernism in Scandinavia originated in the minority Finland-Swedish culture, in a country exposed to extreme stresses and strains as a result of the Russian hegemony which had lasted, despite violent protests, until 1917, only to be followed by a bloody civil war. Finland-Swedish modernism needs to be seen against the background of a threatened minority culture whose exposed situation could give rise to exclusive attitudes as well as extreme individualism.15 In Swedish literature, modernism was to remain a controversial phenomenon until well into the 1940s. The poet Edith Sodergran (1892-1923), who came to play a pioneering role for Swedish as well as Finland-Swedish modernism, was in fact born and educated in St Petersburg; and, after some time spent in a Swiss TB clinic, she lived the remainder of her life with her mother in the hamlet of Raivola in Finland's eastern border country. Her education, in a German school, had laid the foundation for her international perspective, with her early poetry being written in German, French and Russian as well as Swedish; and the influence of German pre-expressionism and Russian symbolism and futurism is apparent throughout much of her work.16 Her limited output — four slim volumes of poetry and a posthumous collection — is characterised by a remarkable artistic boldness, the resulting disruption of conventional notions of form and content placing an emphatically female subject at the centre of the textual universe. In Edith Sodergran's first volume, Dikter (Poems, 1916),17 the influence of 1890s Romanticism is still strong,

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but the traditional vocabulary is torn apart by the powerful urge for self-realisation and by the visions this engenders. Again and again, female self-awareness and desire confront the conventional boundaries of women's existence, with a poem such as 'Vierge moderne' deconstructing the very notion of women's roles: I am no woman. I am a neuter. I am a child, a page and a bold reserve, I am a laughing stripe of scarlet sun . . . I am a net for all greedy fish, I am a skoal to the glory of all women, I am a step towards hazard and ruin, I am a leap into freedom and s e l f . . . I am the whisper of blood in the ear of man, I am the soul's ague, the longing and refusal of the flesh, I am the entrance sign to new paradises, I am a flame, searching and brazen, I am water, deep but daring up to the knee, I am fire and water in free and loyal union . . ,18 Edith Sodergran's first book of poetry had caused a scandal; and her second volume, Septemberlyran (September Lyre, 1918), heightened the controversy. Its famous 'Introductory Note' concluded with the words, 'My self-confidence depends on the fact that I have discovered my dimensions. It does not become me to make myself less than I am';19 and the volume is strongly coloured by the influence of Nietzsche. In terms of language and form, this influence has resulted in a new and ruthless boldness: the late nineteenth-century traditionalism which can be traced in the first volume has gone, and the texts in September Lyre formulate an explicit expressionism coupled with an emphatic worship of beauty. In the illuminating analysis of David McDuff, the translator, Edith Sodergran had 'absorbed the whole of the external crisis, both that of the outside world and that of her own ailing body, into a subjective pathos', and had come to regard 'the willed and conscious development of this extreme subjectivity as a kind of duty, a holy sacrifice'.20 The female self has become even more confident, its creative desire knowing no limits:

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HOPE I want to be unconstrained — therefore I care not a fig for noble styles. I roll up my sleeves. The poem's dough is rising . . . Oh what a pity that I cannot bake cathedrals . . . Highness of forms — goal of persistent longing. Child of the present — does your spirit not have a proper shell? Before I die I shall bake a cathedral.21 The breathless intensity and the bold visions also characterise the letters written by Edith Sodergran to her close friend, the critic Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), between January 1919 and April 1923.22 There are reminders here both of the poverty that Edith Sodergran experienced for several years towards the end of her life and of the additional hardship and danger posed by the Civil War; but these mundane difficulties are overshadowed by the author's sensuous delight in nature and by the plans she is drawing up for the future. The latter included a centre in mid-Europe to which Edith Sodergran and Hagar Olsson would attach significant figures with the task of improving the world - Henri Barbusse, Hjalmar Branting and Rudolf Steiner were mentioned — 'But the home shall be ours, i.e. only we (how many of us are there in the world?) have that spirit of superhuman boldness which is speaking its pure language and pulling forcibly at the past'.23 The significant section of 'sister poems' in Edith Sodergran's third volume, Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar, 1919), had been inspired by her friendship with Hagar Olsson. In Edith Sodergran's late work, there is a shift away from Nietzscheanism towards a Christian commitment. The posthumous collection edited by Hagar Olsson in 1925, Landet som icke dr (The Land that is Not) confirmed Edith Sodergran's stature: to quote the American scholar George C. Schoolfield, 'she has been a major liberating force on Scandinavia's poetry, even as Rimbaud

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was on that of France'.24 In Sweden, the modernist poet Gunnar Ekelof (1907—1968) is probably the writer most obviously inspired by Edith Sodergran, but there are also some interesting influences to be found in the work of Karin Boye. The early poetry of Karin Boye (1900-1941), like that of Edith Sodergran, testifies to the lasting impact of the 1890s, but Karin Boye needed more time to free herself from the established models. While both poets use nature symbolism in similar ways, the longing or striving for integrity and consistency that pervades much of Karin Boye's work is in sharp contrast to Edith Sodergran's triumphant assertions of self; arguably, the very comparison contributed to showing up Karin Boye's difficult position in sharper relief. Setting out her modernist programme in articles and essays, Karin Boye put this into practice in prose texts as well as in her poetry; her texts, however, never lose sight of the restricting impact of the standards of a patriarchal system, and the resulting dialectic is very different from anything found in the texts of Edith Sodergran (see Chapter 6). The year 1929 saw the emergence of a group of male workingclass modernists who tend to be known, after the the title of their joint collection, a.sfem unga (five young men). Their background was a pointer to the changes remoulding Swedish society, and their celebration of primitivism and vitalism, in opposition to more academic literary preoccupations, should be seen in this context. Their texts reinforced the conventional image of woman as mistress and mother; and the recurring 1930s definition of the female body in terms of landscape and scenery has been described by a feminist critic as 'the cliche of the decade'.25 Recent research has clarified the extent to which the work of Moa Martinson (1890-1964), the leading female working-class writer of this period, challenges many of the tenets central to the texts of her male colleagues and develops a feminist modernism.26 One notable point of comparison is Moa Martinson's trilogy of autobiographical novels in which she exploited, like Elin Wagner in Unmasked and Secretive, a high-profile genre to which she gave a critical feminist slant (see Chapter 7). Stina Aronson (1892-1956) explored a range of genres and published realist prose texts before turning to modernist experimentation in the late 1920s. Her Feberboken (The Fever Book,

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1931) is an innovatory novel which investigates male and female language and, more specifically, the image of woman evolved by the 'five young men'.27 Medaljen overJenny (The Medal in Honour of Jenny, 1935) is the ambiguous, partly ironical tide of a novel about a young woman whose ambition it is to do something other than slip into the conventional career envisaged for her by her parents. The small-scale business she develops, producing textile handicrafts and employing women only, has the potential of a revolutionary venture, but Stina Aronson's texts shun that which is declamatory and overtly dramatic. It is the quietly ordinary character who is at the centre of her work, the patient and subtle observation endowing the very ordinariness with a stature and, indeed, a mystery of its own. At a metaphorical level, it is possible to discern a link between the central character's work with textiles and the text's preoccupation with form, highlighted throughout by a narrator who consistently subverts the rules of realism and emerges as an experimental character in her own right. Hitom himlen (This Side of Heaven, 1946) is the novel generally regarded as Stina Aronson's masterpiece. Again, the events are notably low-key and there is not much of a plot. The text revolves around some members of an isolated and scattered community in the far north of Sweden: Emma Niskanpaa, the wife of a smallholder, is widowed; her beloved son John falls ill with tuberculosis and has to spend a long time in hospital; and the wife of a neighbour elopes with a preacher. Out of these elements Stina Aronson has woven a text inspired by the northern sparseness of speech and imbued with poetic resonances. Just as conversations in this part of the world demand patient participation, so the characters in Stina Aronson's text require our lengthy and dogged attention in order to become visible and assume their dimensions. Moreover, they are invariably part of a vast and sparsely populated landscape, in the grip of cold, snow and darkness in winter and offering only a brief respite filled with hard work in summer. Interestingly, this overwhelming landscape with its darkness and light is allowed to assume the same level of significance as the characters, the replacement of the conventional hierarchy with a juxtaposition having been read as a critique of the anthropocentrism of our civilisation.28 It is no accident that the text also shuns conventional chronology, the narrative picking up various threads, allowing the

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inevitable repetitions to stand out, and ensuring that the story is left open-ended and relatively unfinished. Conveying the mystery of ordinary human life more convincingly and more assuredly than The Medal in Honour of Jenny, This Side of Heaven also succeeds in pointing beyond modernism to a postmodernism more familiar from the final decades of the twentieth century. Sweden's most controversial writer in the 1930s, however, was neither a modernist nor a working-class author. Agnes von Krusenstjerna (1894-1940) came from an upper-class background — which tends to be reflected in her texts — and wrote about eroticism with a frankness that seemed extraordinary at the time. Her output consisted of short stories and, most importantly, three large-scale novels. The first of these, the trilogy about Tony Hastfehr (1922—26), is a female Entwicklungsroman, tracing a young girl's path to self-discovery and eventual mental breakdown. While reflecting Agnes von Krusenstjerna's fondness for girls' stories, the trilogy highlights a series of sexual insights, culminating in Tony's experience of abuse by a young male doctor. More powerful is the portrayal of Tony's relationship with her sick mother; and the central character's mounting mental instability is depicted with considerable precision and candour. Agnes von Krusenstjerna's best-known novel is the seven-volume Froknarna von Pahlen (The Misses von Pahlen, 1930—35), of which the first three volumes were published by Bonniers with the remaining four published by a small avant-garde house, Spektrum. At the centre of the plot are Petra von Pahlen, who at the age of 27 inherits a country estate in Smaland, and her orphaned niece, Angela, who is 12 years old when she comes to live with her aunt. Beyond these central characters there are widening circles of relatives and other figures, resulting in an ambitious and vivid canvas. Here Angela's exploration of her sexuality is only part of an extensive pattern which also includes an incestuous relationship and lesbian love. The sexual explicitness of the series resulted in a long-lasting public controversy, echoes of which seem to persist in the judgement, in one of the major handbooks on Swedish literature, of the concluding volume with its exclusively female realm as 'sensationalist' and 'depraved'.29 Agnes von Krusenstjerna's plan for the novel, on the other hand, had placed this Utopian sketch in a specific chronological context: 'Out there in the war

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sons are murdered and mothers are withering away. Eka [Petra von Pahlen's estate] is the site of new growth'.30 A feminist and psychoanalytical re-reading of the series by Birgitta Svanberg (1989)31 has underlined the radicalism of Agnes von Krusenstjerna's project and has traced the roots of the scenes of a female realm to Hertha's school in Fredrika Bremer's Hertha (1856), Ellen Key's notion of 'social motherliness', and Elin Wagner's demand for a system centring on mother and child, to mention but some examples.32 Agnes von Krusenstjerna's last major work, Fattigadd (Petty Nobility, 1935-38), again explores such themes as eroticism and feminine integrity, but the detailed depiction of an isolated and increasingly marginalised social class adds a significant cultural dimension. AFFLUENCE AND GENDER INEQUALITY

At the end of the Second World War, Sweden was in a most advantageous position in economic terms, having its entire industry and infrastructure intact. Confounding the fears of a downturn similar to the one after the First World War, the economy grew rapidly, and Swedish products such as Volvo cars and Electrolux refrigerators and vacuum cleaners began to establish their international reputation. The Social Democratic Government that replaced the wartime coalition in 1945 had restated its priorities as being full employment, a fair distribution of wealth, and efficiency and democracy within trade and industry. After the death of Per Albin Hanssori in 1946, Tage Erlander became his successor and remained Prime Minister until 1969. With regard to domestic politics, the post-war years were characterised by a range of Social Democratic reforms, many of them planned before or during the war. Most successful were the extensive social reforms which expanded the 'home of the people', making Sweden, along with France, one of the leading countries in terms of social provision by the late 1940s.33 A policy of high taxation helped to finance these reforms. On the other hand, there was no marked increase in nationalisation or state influence over trade and industry, the Social Democratic Government during the period 1945—51 being less socialist than the Labour Government in power in Britain at the time.34 By the late 1940s, the Social Democrats were looking to

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strengthen their political base. They found a coalition partner in the Agrarian Party; and the coalition government was in power from 1951 to 1957, working to consolidate what had been achieved by the reforms of the 1940s and to develop any additional measures required to complement these reforms.35 The issue that eventually tore the coalition apart concerned the introduction of a Supplementary Pension scheme, designed to iron out some of the remaining inequalities. The Pension issue in a sense marked the end of an era, with socio-economic problems becoming less prominent during the 1960s.36 As the ideological confrontations between the parties to some extent faded into the background, a number of new issues surfaced. Environmental problems began to preoccupy many Swedes during the 1960s, their early awareness partly explicable in terms of the country's recent urbanisation and the citizens' lasting links with the countryside. Moral issues came to the fore ancl resulted in the formation of a Christian political party, Kristen Demokratisk Samling (Christian Democrats) in 1964. Aspects of foreign policy became prominent in the country's public debate, bringing into focus an awareness that had been building up since the end of the Second World War. While Norway and Denmark had become members of NATO, Sweden had preferred to remain neutral. But Sweden hadjoined the United Nations in 1946, with Swedish troops participating in a number of United Nations peace keeping operations during the 1950s and 1960s; and from 1953 to 1961 the post of Secretary General of the United Nations was held by a Swede, Dag Hammarskjold. With Sweden having joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1959, the debate during the 1960s was partly concerned with Sweden's possible membership of the European Economic Community. Assistance to the developing countries also became a major issue, and the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) was set up in 1965 to channel aid to the developing countries. The growing Swedish interest in areas such as the Third World and the environment can be seen as reflections of the state of the 'home of the people': although not yet complete, the construction of it was felt to be so far advanced that the citizens could afford to turn their attention beyond their immediate situation. It is significant that the issue of gender roles also developed into one of the key strands of the public debate in Sweden during

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the 1960s. The discussion of gender roles, however, is better considered in conjunction with second-wave feminism and will thus be dealt with in Chapter 9. But the situation of women in Sweden which inspired this debate belongs to the period with which we are concerned here, and I shall focus on the position of women in two major areas crucial to the construction of a fair and equal society: education and employment. While Sweden had rapidly developed an extensive system of voluntary education, dominated by study circles run by temperance organisations, by the Swedish equivalent of the Workers' Educational Association, Arbetarnas Bildnings-Forbund (founded in 1912), by the Extra-Mural Departments of the universities (from 1933) and by other bodies, improvements to the compulsory school system and to further and higher education were comparatively slow and late. Although the period of compulsory schooling was gradually extended, the studentexamen or higher school certificate, which was the gateway to higher education, long remained accessible only to middle-class and upper middle-class pupils, the vast majority of whom were boys. Work on eradicating these differences was initiated with the appointment of a School Commission in 1940. A nine-year comprehensive school, designed to give all pupils an equal start, was proposed in 1948; and after pilot schemes during the 1950s the decision to introduce the new system throughout the country was taken in 1962. Subsequently, the upper secondary system was also transformed with the introduction of new lines of study and the abolition of the traditional studentexamen. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, only a very small proportion of 20-year-olds had embarked on university studies each year: in the 1920s, the figure had been a mere 1.5 per cent, with only one tenth of the students being women; and by 1950 the overall figure had risen to just under 4 per cent.37 Higher education underwent a huge expansion in the 1960s, with the University of Umea being founded in 1963 and a number of branch universities, attached to the existing ones at Uppsala, Lund, Stockholm and Gothenburg, being established in 1967-68. A system of loans replaced the earlier system of selective grants in 1964. By 1970-71, enrolment at Swedish universities was more than three times higher than it had been ten years previously.38 To what extent, then, were women in a position to take

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advantage of this drive towards equality in education? A survey covering much of the 1960s, and thus reflecting the impact of many of the reforms, painted a worrying picture, suggesting that reforms as such would in no way result in equality in terms of gender. Girls, it was pointed out, tended to make very conventional choices for their spell of practical experience in the labour market, part of the curriculum of the new comprehensive school.39 Girls were found to be far more likely than boys not to continue in the upper secondary school because of socio-economic and geographical obstacles.40 Those who did attend upper secondary school tended to choose, to a far greater extent than did boys, less career-oriented lines of study such as the humanities.41 In the vocational schools this pattern was even more marked, with the girls showing a distinct 'lack of interest in career oriented education'.42 The pattern was reflected, too, in the universities — although women with academic qualifications were found to be more likely to be in employment than women with lower qualifications.43 In 1965, more than 40 per cent of the newly enrolled students were women. Although there was a rise in the number of women studying medicine and dentistry, most of the new women students were to be found in the arts faculties, where they predominated.44 At postgraduate level, however, women were wholly outnumbered by men. Parallel trends could be observed in the labour market. The Swedish trade unions had been consolidating their position and expanding their influence since the end of the First World War. New unions had reinforced the strength of the employees; and in industry and other areas covered by the Swedish Trades Union Confederation, membership soon reached very high levels. But this membership was dominated by men. While in 1907 only 9 per cent of the members of the Swedish Trades Union Confederation were women, this figure had risen by 1967, but to a mere 26 per cent.45 Needless to say, very few women reached the decision-making structures. During the period of economic expansion after the Second World War, the Swedish engineering industry continued to develop while some traditional industries (textiles, shoes) contracted.46 The service sector became increasingly important from the 1960s onwards. The growing demand for labour had resulted in considerable immigration since the end of the war, initially chiefly

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from the other Scandinavian countries (a joint Scandinavian labour market had been in existence since 1954) but gradually also from Southern Europe. The immigrant workers often found themselves doing jobs which, in a period of full employment, seemed less attractive to the native Swedes; and it has been argued that women to some extent had a similar function in the labour market.47 By 1960, the proportion of women in employment in Sweden was roughly equal to the average for Western Europe, but while it was higher than in the United States, it was somewhat lower than in Britain, Denmark or Finland.48 In the previous three decades, there had been a decline in the proportion of women running their own businesses, while the proportion of women workers had remained more or less unchanged and the proportion of women academics and salaried employees had risen slightly.49 In terms of the numbers of women employed, the most popular areas of employment, in the 1940s and 1950s, had been (1) commerce; (2) manufacturing; (3) public administration and other services, the order shifting in the 1960s to (1) public administration and other services; (2) manufacturing; (3) commerce.50 The labour market as a whole showed up clear boundaries in terms of gender, with 71 per cent of women employees being concentrated in about 20 job categories by 1960, at a time when only 11.7 per cent of male employees were to be found in these categories.51 Needless to say, the jobs done by women tended to be less well paid than those done by men. Sweden ratified the International Labour Organisation convention on equal pay for men and women in 1962; but two years later the average pay for women was a mere 60 per cent of that of men.52 DISTINCTIVE VOICES

Astrid Lindgren's (born 1907) Pippi Langstrump (Pippi Longstocking) appeared in 1945, introducing a young girl who is strong, independent and resourceful, who spurns adult control, visits school only to poke fun at it, and has no qualms about taking policemen for a ride. Challenging more conventional young heroines and created, indeed, as an antithesis to L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables,53 the wonderfully anarchic Pippi has fascinated generations of children in Sweden and beyond. Although standard histories of Swedish literature do not list very

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many women writers in the period 1945-61 and only the most recent will include a writer of children's books such as Astrid Lindgren, the number of women writers was increasing. There are numerous examples, moreover, of individual and highly distinctive voices which tend, as in the case of Pippi Longstocking, to be voices of protest. Several of the women writers of this period were not only continuing the tradition of radicalism from Fredrika Bremer onwards which I have been tracing above: they were also helping to prepare the new and much more powerful wave of radical women's writing that was going to make its mark on Swedish literature from the 1970s onwards. The Second World War had an extensive impact on Swedish literature. The rise of fascism in the 1930s had resulted in numerous examples ofberedskapslittemtur, 'literature of preparedness', i.e. texts defending democratic and humanist values, for instance by Par Lagerkvist (1891—1974), a poet, playwright and novelist, and by the novelist Eyvind Johnson (1900-1976). Seemingly similar texts by women writers have traditionally been grouped with the work of their male colleagues; only recently has it been pointed out that the feminist pacifism illustrated by Elin Wagner's works of the 1930s (see Chapter 4) and by Karin Boye's Kallocain (see Chapter 6) is very different from the 'literature of preparedness' with its insistence on safeguarding what is in effect a patriarchal system.54 This critical difference of writing by women can also be traced in the 1940s, the decade when modernism eventually gained acceptance in Sweden and male writers such as the poet Erik Lindegren (1910—1968) and the novelist Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) formulated their Angst and despair in volumes with titles such as mannen utan vdg (the man without a way, 1942) and De domdas 6 (The Island of the Doomed, 1946). In the texts of the women poets and novelists whose work first appeared during this decade it is possible to discern an attitude of protest rather than despair, the clearer focus developing into a more constructive position as the Cold War extends during the 1950s. The radical edge of many texts by women in the period 1945-61 is remarkable; and it is no accident that a writer like Ulla Isaksson (born 1916), whose first novels appeared in the 1940s, was subsequently to write, together with her husband Erik Hjalmar Linder, a biography of Elin Wagner (2 vols, 1977—80). A couple of the more notable women poets beginning their careers in the

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1940s soon showed themselves to be precursors of the eco-feminist and feminist pacifist writers of the 1970s and 1980s. Elsa Grave (born 1918), poet, novelist and playwright, is one of these distinctive voices that becomes a voice of protest; in the words of her colleague Goran Palm, 'We have hardly ever before had a woman poet who has preached her feminine integrity with such anger and resilience'.55 She took a degree at the University of Lund and also studied painting and music, the influence of music being notable in the use of structure, rhythm and sound in her texts. Her first book of poetry was published in 1943, but her breakthrough came with her third collection of poems, Bortforklaring (Excuse, 1948). Here the firm plan and frequently antithetical composition signal the affinity between words and music, with Elsa Grave's subtle allusions to classical rhythms often colliding with the contents and resulting in ironical and satirical effects. The section entitled 'Karlekens nidvisor' ('Love's Lampoons') turns conventional notions of love on their head, the echoes of familiar love poetry reinforcing the clear-sighted ruthlessness of these poems. But the best-known poem in this collection is 'Svinborstnatt' ('Hog's Bristle Night'), which draws on elegantly flowing rhythms to depict pigs in a sty, achieving a physical presence and affinity that has the effect of blurring the border between the animal and the human. The novel Ariel (1955) similarly plays with different registers as the female first-person narrator of this Entwicklungsroman is occasionally replaced by an omniscient narrator and other focalisers. Marina's desire for freedom, which is confronted with ample illustrations of conventional women's roles, is rooted in art and her affinity with nature. But it assumes a wider significance which implies a social critique via the contrasting images of the gnome and the airy spirit, the gnome defined as lacking in perspective, useful, and submissive — 'the pillar of society'.56 In the play Flasksabbat (Bacon Sabbath), published in Tre lyriska grdl (Three Lyrical Quarrels, 1962), a parallel contrast is developed into a devastating attack on Western materialism as the family Christmas setting with its focus on overeating results in a central metaphor that quickly becomes grotesque. In an interview in 1989, Elsa Grave spoke of her conviction that the arms race along with environmental destruction would

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bring the end of life on earth.57 Deeply troubled by the limited perspective and consequent pliability of the individual human being, Elsa Grave has, since the early 1960s, been depicting the plight of humankind in a worldwide and, indeed, cosmic context, her trenchant critique of many of the central tenets of modern Western society giving her the voice of a prophetess. Thus the poems in Isdityramb (Ice Dithyramb, 1960) with their recurring images of ice, fire, and water paint the state of our world after the Bomb; while the collection entitled Hojdforluststs(Loss of Altitude, 1965) draws on the motif of mother and child to expose the depletion of the earth's resources. Merciless in their clarity of perspective, the poems in Modrar som vargar (Mothers as Wolves, 1972) point up connections between the frustration of desire that imbues the mother-child relationship and the apocalyptic situation of humankind. In a collection where the diction has become notably more terse, the central theme is illustrated by the poem 'Overgivna' ('Abandoned'), which recurs three times throughout the book: The wind howls in an abandoned child in its ribcage rattles a heart empty with charred embraces a skeletal heart of smouldering tenderness from a mother torn apart she is hanging on barbed wire as still as a paper heart on a Christmas tree and the wind is singing in her too through her temples a white oboe is bleeding its anxious song about lost children.58 Elsa Grave's sustained criticism of civilisation is thrown into relief by the prominence of nature and its rhythms to which

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the mother and child are obviously central. In the visionary poems in Slutforbannelser (Final Curses, 1977), images of grass and flowers provide the antitheses of the global desert resulting from the destruction of the biosphere; and in Evighetens barnbarn (The Grandchildren of Eternity, 1982), the images of an apocalyptic landscape are contrasted with the powerful presence of trees and forests. The significance of the forces of creation in the work of Elsa Grave is consistently celebrated by the texts themselves with their marked rhythms and elaborate affinity with music. The critical voice in the work of Ann-Margret DahlquistLjungberg (born 1915) stems from a more explicitly feminist perspective and she has also been engaging more palpably in the current debate, with numerous poems and articles published in the press. While her pacifist commitment has been apparent since the 1940s, when she published her first collections of poetry, her work from the 1960s onwards has also testified to her environmental concerns, the message of the texts frequently reinforced by the author's own chilling illustrations. Many of the prose texts in Att lam gamla hundar sitta (Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks, 1962) satirise Swedish bureaucracy and its cumbersome language, but the collection also contains a perceptive essay on Elin Wagner and her Alarm Clock. The texts in Isoga (Eye of Ice, 1978) include 'Sangen om Matriarkatta' ('The Song about Matriarchatta'), a television play outlining a future when women have assumed power, but in a Sweden "where all the bureaucratic constraints not only remain in place but are taken to new and absurd heights. Ann-Margret Dahlquist-Ljungberg's pacifism has resulted in a notable preoccupation with nuclear war, for example in the novel Strdlen (The Ray, 1958) and in the texts in Barnen i stenen (The Children in the Stone, 1983), the latter book focusing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her work is another important example of Swedish feminist pacifism. Alongside modernism, realism continued to flourish. Novelists such as Dagmar Edqvist (born 1903) and Alice Lyttkens (1897—1992) wrote about the new, emancipated woman. Tora Dahl (1886-1982), who had published her first novel in 1935, explored the situation of women with considerable psychological sensitivity: in her second novel, Inkvartering (Lodging, 1937), the immensely detailed narrative is integral to the central character's

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search for her self. Tora Dahl, however, is best known for her autobiographical series, begun with eight novels about a fictitious self called Gunborg (1954—66) and concluded with nine volumes of memoirs (1968—81). The juxtaposition of genres preferred for the exploration of a woman's life is striking, and the text conveys a clear awareness of the situation of women in a patriarchal system. Ulla Isaksson (born 1916), author of novels, short stories, film scripts and a play, is also a realist, her texts mostly revolving around women characters and showing a preference, too, for foregrounding traditionally feminine values. The ideals of Ellen Key (see Chapter 1) have been mentioned in conjunction with Ulla Isaksson's work;59 in due course, second-wave feminism would also seem to have provided an important source of encouragement. While Ulla Isaksson's early books, published in the 1940s, had been strongly influenced by her membership of one of the free churches and characterised by explicit moral guidelines, her output since the 1950s has been considerably more sophisticated, combining psychological depth with the skilful handling of a wide range of characters and developing, too, a striking structural elegance. Thus the relatively loose plot of Kvinnohuset (House of Women, 1952) provocatively intertwines the situations of a number of women, focusing on their ambivalence with regard to their dependence on men and highlighting, too, the role of sisterly support. Dit du icke vill (Whither Thou Wouldest Not, 1956) exploits both third-person narrative and the epistolary form to present a broad panorama of a seventeenth-century Swedish community in the grip of witch-trials, the historical setting conveyed with knowledge and conviction. Here the feelings whipped up by the trials and the impulses unleashed by the torture of the suspects become a measure of the moral dislocation of this society: according to one observer in the novel, it is as if the law of God had been replaced by that of the Devil.60 In Ulla Isaksson's text, however, seventeenth-century notions of good and evil are complicated by twentieth-century insights into psychology. The community indulging in witch-trials is lacking in love; but in a world that has had to face the horrors of the German concentration camps during the Second World War, the equation can never be simple. It is significant that the novel's strong central character, Hanna from Lustiggarden, who

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stands accused of witch-craft, eventually realises that she, too, is lacking in love: only ruthless self-honesty can initiate the personal transformation that emerges, for all the difficulties, as fundamental to a different society. De tvd saliga (The Blessed Couple, 1962), is characterised by psychological complexity and perfection of form. A widowed psychiatrist is going through the documents on a case offolie a deux, his discoveries inexorably homing in on his own marriage. The diaries left behind by his wife provide an alternative focalisation, the text contrasting Elisabeth's desire for love and for a child with her husband's inhibitions and fears to the point where we are left to conclude that his destructive attitudes have precipitated her death. Lack of love is a theme transposed to a wider setting in Pamdistorg (Paradise Place, 1973), probably UUa Isaksson's best-known novel, which uses a contemporary milieu and draws on the focalisation of a range of characters to pinpoint aspects of modern Swedish society. Ulla Isaksson's starting-point was a sociological report of the 1960s on children growing up without love and care and reacting with destructive and violent behaviour.61 In the novel the 'Aniara child', named after Harry Martinson's space epic (1956), is placed in an extended family of several generations immersed in their traditional summer rituals at a turn-of-the-century summer house outside Stockholm. In a family circle that can be read as a microcosm of Swedish society, the impact of the 'Aniara child' is carefully assessed; but Katha, daughter of the couple who built the house and a doctor, is not impressed by the Ellen Key-inspired arguments of her friend the social worker. It takes a family tragedy for Katha to accept the need for responsibility for others, irrespective of their background and social standing. Referring to Paradise Place, Ulla Isaksson has spoken of the social role of the caring instinct, in men as well as in women;62 and one of the text's innovatory characters is a young man who manages children and household duties with skill as well as relish. Ulla Isaksson's latest novel, Fodelsedagen (The Birthday, 1988), again highlights the significance of love, but from the perspective of an old person. The narrative revolves around female characters and, more particularly, around the mother-daughter relationship, also the subject of Ulla Isaksson's earlier novel Klanningen (The Dress, 1959). In The Birthday Olga, who is widowed and in her seventies,

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surveys her life in the ruins of the once flourishing community where she has worked with her husband and brought up three daughters. Her loneliness and disappointment breed bitterness in place of the love on which she has constructed her life; and it is telling that she is never reunited with her daughters for whom she is longing so intensely. The text, however, lays bare the impact of love in forms more subtle and extended than Olga can hope to perceive. With its wisdom and narrative skill, this is one of Ulla Isaksson's most satisfying and positive novels. In comparison with the work of Ulla Isaksson, that of Birgitta Trotzig (born 1929) is dependent on a stronger and more specific religious conviction to formulate a more far-reaching critique of society. Here, too, the influence of male and female, of culture and nature, is analysed; but the investigation is more fundamental, drawing, also, on the formal models of modernism (see Chapter 8). The texts of Birgitta Trotzig can be seen as rounding off a period when women writers, despite their continuing unequal status in society, achieve growing prominence and, most importantly, grasp the opportunity to protest against what they find with a diversity that is as fruitful as it is exciting.

6 Karin Boye (1900-1941) CRITICAL STANDING AND LIFE

Karin Boye, poet, novelist, essayist and critic, is an early and major modernist in Swedish literature, combining impulses from international as well as Scandinavian modernism with a radical commitment to art and politics to advance significant shifts in both poetry and prose fiction. Until very recently, however, the predominance of positivism in Swedish literary criticism has been obscuring Karin Boye's contribution, with the approaches to her poetry and prose determined largely by the context of her life and personality. Less than a decade after Karin Boye's early death, the critic Margit Abenius published a biography which became highly influential.1 Her biographical readings, which place considerable emphasis on the role of Karin Boye's lesbianism, have not been significantly expanded by the authors of the major handbooks on Swedish literature. Thus Erik Hjalmar Linder foregrounds Karin Boye's sexuality; and his claim that her writing 'first and foremost reflects the struggle between conflicting philosophies of life in the inter-war years'2 is not borne out by his analysis. Gunnar Brandell emphasises the innovatory form of Karin Boye's mature poetry but reads it as 'a means for her to approach her own experiences', concluding that the trajectory of her output is marked by 'the battle between form and formlessness within herself.3 Remarkably similar is Anders Palm's recent survey (1989), which does acknowledge the role of Karin Boye's modernist radicalism but which, in the final analysis, inscribes her artistic innovations in her private dilemma: 'she had conquered a new language for an inner world of fragmentation'.4 Anders Palm's attention to Karin Boye's modernist awareness has undoubtedly been prompted by Gunilla Domellof s major study, published in 1986.5 Highlighting Karin Boye's contribution as an essayist and a literary critic, Gunilla Domellof reads the prose fiction

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in the light of the writer's extensive radical commitment. The perspectives opened up by this investigation, which include the significance of Karin Boye's feminism, testify to the fruitfulness of this type of wider, textually and ideologically based analysis; and my discussion of Karin Boye's oeuvre will take Domellof s findings as its starting-point. A precocious child, Karin Boye had been writing poems and stories from an early age. She was born in Gothenburg in 1900. Her father was an engineer who went on to combine a managerial position in an insurance company with extensive interests in the arts, while her mother was involved in women's issues and politics as well as in spiritualism and religion. In 1909 the family, which by then also included Karin Boye's two younger brothers, moved to Stockholm. After taking her studentexamen — roughly the equivalent of A-levels — in 1920, Karin Boye spent a year at a teacher training college and qualified as an elementary-school teacher. In 1923 she embarked on undergraduate studies at the University of Uppsala, studying Greek, Scandinavian Languages and Literature. She completed her degree at the University of Stockholm, graduating in 1928. Karin Boye had published her first book of poetry before going to Uppsala, and after graduating she was to work only periodically as a teacher, one of her longest spells of employment being the two years she spent at the new and progressive Viggbyholm School outside Stockholm. While in Uppsala, she had joined the radical Clarte movement, which has maintained a high profile throughout Scandinavia during much of this century, disseminating its ideas via public debates, study circles and similar educational initiatives, and via the journal Clarte. Karin Boye joined the group editing Clarte in 1927, and some of her best known poems first appeared in this.journal. From 1929 to 1932 she was married to Leif Bjork, a well-known Clarte activist. The move from Uppsala to Stockholm for the final year of her undergraduate course propelled Karin Boye into new radical circles, and in 1931 she became one of the editors of the avantgarde journal Spektrum. This journal, which was to play a leading role in the introduction of modernism in Sweden, combined a Marxist commitment with an interest in psychoanalysis, its

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contributions ranging over music, art and architecture as well as literature, with works by modernist poets such as Gunnar Ekelof and Harry Martinson appearing in its pages. Karin Boye published a number of major essays in Spektrum as well as the translation which she had done jointly with Erik Mesterton of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1932). But her ties with Spektrum were loosened by 1932 when she spent a long period in Berlin. In Berlin she underwent psychoanalysis, and she returned to Sweden determined to concentrate on her writing. Her first novel had appeared in 1931, and in the next nine years she was to publish another four. Her fourth book of poetry came out in 1935, and she also published two volumes of short stories (1934, 1940) as well as leaving behind a collection of poems and a number of prose texts that appeared posthumously. Karin Boye committed suicide in April 1941. POETRY OF THE 1920S

Karin Boye's output is characterised by a remarkable consistency. Her first book of poetry, Moln (Clouds, 1922), charts a personal development which can be seen to reflect some of the major issues of the period, but which also pinpoints a dialectic which was to pervade much of her oeuvre. An early poem such as 'En buddhistisk fantasi' ('A Buddhist Fantasy') testifies to the young Karin Boye's reading of Schopenhauer and her preoccupation with Buddhism; as Margit Abenius has pointed out, Karin Boye during a period in her teens openly professed to being a Buddhist.6 Later in her teens she became a devout Christian, a phase illustrated by poems such as 'Aftonbon' ('Evening Prayer') with its hymn-like simplicity and by 'VagskaT ('Crossroads') with its acceptance of a mundane life in the service of God but with a perspective on the enviable fate of the saints. The poem 'Inat' ('Inwards') has generally been seen as a turning-point in this collection: in stark rhythms, it celebrates a self, a sense of identity previously held in check by religious fervour:

My God and my truth I saw in a rare moment. [---]

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While the regular rhythms of many of the early poems in this first collection can be seen as inspired by Swedish poetry of the 1890s, represented by poets such as Gustaf Froding and Verner von Heidenstam, the bolder rhythm of 'Inwards' is more akin to the poetry of Vilhelm Ekelund (1880-1949), who drew on classical writers and on early German Romantics such as Holderlin. As Margit Abenius has observed, the poems succeeding 'Inwards' tend to employ less regular metrical patterns,8 but there are in fact earlier indications of this shift, for example in 'Morgonsang' ('Morning Song') with its ecstatic celebration of joy in the vein of Edith Sodergran: This is life's quiet hour, sunny and blessed, laughing white in power-conscious peace.9 Characteristically, however, the speaker goes on to check herself: 'How dare I . . . ? And yet!'.10 This ambivalence pervades much of Clouds: while the poems gradually acknowledge the role of desire, of the need to embrace life in its multitude of forms including the hidden depths unveiled by psychoanalysis, many of them also reveal an asceticism, an extreme idealism strongly coloured by Christianity, which runs counter to this acceptance and which is thus also inimical to the emergence of a sense of identity. A poem such as 'Angslan' ('Anxiety'), pitching the two tendencies against each other, significantly culminates in the lines: God, God, retain just a glimpse of my earnest pure, pure!11 Along with 'white', 'pure' is a key word in Clouds, a collection

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which only begins to open up a perspective on the multiplicity of life but which, in doing so, pinpoints a conflict that is at the root of the dialectic in a number of Karin Boye's texts. If this conflict/dialectic has its origin in her sexuality — and homosexuality was to remain a crime in Sweden until 1944 — it is significantly expanded by the feminist consciousness that becomes conspicuous in a novel such as Astarte (1931). Although Karin Boye is a modernist, her texts conveying the perspectives of distinct and coherent individuals, I believe that their central conflict/dialectic can be usefully approached in the light of the much more recent distinction between phallogocentrism12 and feminine multiplicity. Christianity, to take but the most obvious example, can then be seen as a facet of a male-dominated system that thwarts women's attempts to emerge as subjects. To free themselves from this dominance, women need to embrace the multiplicity of life. Karin Boye's texts, however, do not amount to a celebration of multiplicity per se, as do the texts of a feminist philosopher such as Luce Irigaray:13 in Karin Boye's works there is space within this multiplicity for a coherent female subject, which may even be Nietzschean in its determination. And unlike the texts of Irigaray, many of Karin Boye's texts keep returning to the restraints of. phallogocentrism, thus setting up a characteristic dialectic. The exceptions are her poems which, after the first collection, tear themselves away from the narrow confines of phallogocentrism to embrace a multiplicity that is all pervasive. With their more immediate affinity to the 'language beyond the realm of logic' which Karin Boye was to analyse in a famous essay in 1932,14 her poems gradually convey a sense of feminine freedom and identity never fully reflected in her prose. Karin Boye's second book of poetry, Gomda land (Hidden Lands, 1924), opens with the distinctive 'Elementarandar' ('Elemental Spirits'), read by Margit Abenius as a programme for the collection.15 A celebration of the forces of chaos, the poem is akin to the well-known 'Asar och alfer' ('^sir and Elfs') towards the end of the volume with its central contrast between the palpable and familiar world of the ^Esir, the Gods inhabiting Asgard, and the world of the elfs with its space for 'all that is nameless and new'.16 These two poems along with many other ones in Hidden Lands reflect a more emphatic sense of identity which, when translated at the

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level of metre, results in the kind of prodigious variations found in this collection. Distinctive, too, is the role of repetition, with Karin Boye succeeding in imbuing words and whole phrases with subtle differences as they re-emerge, at once unifying and opening up the individual poem. Significantly, Hidden Lands also conveys a far stronger sense of identity than does Karin Boye's first book of poetry. A typical example is the powerfully rhythmic 'Varvisa' ('Spring Song'), which concludes with the lines: I now assume the right to grow the way my roots desire.17 The emphasis on action and renewal is characteristic of this volume: the self is never in stasis but in a continuous process of development. This process can be inspired by a Nietzschean faith in the will of the individual, as in 'Oskadd' ('Unharmed') or the famous 'Skoldmon' ('The Valkyrie'), or it can draw on the powers of nature, whose role in Karin Boye's oeuvre becomes prominent from Hidden Lands onwards. In a poem such as 'Tradet' ('The Tree'), the speaker's affinity with these powers is far-reaching, the presence, seemingly inside her room, of the quietly growing tree that 'becomes what an unknown intends',18 defining an organic mystery of which the human being is clearly part. A number of these themes recur in Karin Boye's next book of poetry, Hdrdarna (The Hearths, 1927). The emphasis on action and change remains, to be most famously expressed in 'I rorelse' ('In Motion') with its assertion that 'The best day is a day of thirst'.19 The Old Norse motifs, inspired by Karin Boye's academic studies of Scandinavian languages, reappear in the terse stanzas about 'Torkel Tyre' with their uncompromising exploration of the relationship between cohesion and justice as the basis of a social structure. The focus on fertility symbolism is developed in poems such as the well-known 'Jag vill mota . . .' ('I Want to Meet . . .') with its characteristic contrast between a fearful defensiveness on the one hand and an unconditional embrace of the forces of life on the other. But this volume also contains a series of love poems, and the perspective on multiplicity has undergone a further change in that it now allows for the inclusion of extreme contrasts, often

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interpreted as reflections of a world that permits humankind no more than a partial and fragmented insight into the overall design. NOVELS OF THE 1930S

With her first novel, Astarte, Karin Boye was runner-up in a Scandinavian novel competition in 1931. This innovatory work, however, has subsequently been neglected, its unconventional form seen as a shortcoming reflecting the author's lack of experience of the genre.20 Only as a result of the work of Gunilla Domellof, who has undertaken the most extensive and most recent critical study of Astarte, has the significance of the novel's pervasive radicalism become more fully apparent. Taking its title from the name of the Syrian goddess of love, whose Greek equivalent was Aphrodite, Karin Boye's novel offers a critical survey of contemporary Swedish society and culture. Since the narrative takes its starting-point in objects and locations rather than in plot, the structure appears to be fragmented, the decentring of the plot simultaneously adding to the impression that the characters are being manipulated rather than being fully in control. The sense of fragmentation is enhanced by the insertion, at regular intervals, of chapters such as 'Ylle' ('Wool'), 'Spetsar' ('Lace') and 'Siden' ('Silk'), which take the materials of the titles as their themes, developing these in terms that have no more than an indirect bearing on the plot. At the same time, however, these chapters, which all eventually focus on the role of the textiles for women's fashion, inevitably also emphasise the feminine text of the novel. In Astarte, where the most prominent types of cultural manifestation are advertising, film and popular weeklies, the manyfaceted, open form of the novel emerges in sharp contrast to the one-sided and closed patterns of twentieth-century mass culture. As Gunilla Domellof has pointed out, it is the linkage of the critique of contemporary culture with the situation of women that makes Astarte a truly radical work.21 The two spheres are fused in the opening chapter in which two advertising experts and an artist discuss a new dummy made in the image of the goddess of love and the artist outlines the rationale of his creation: which of the deities is more powerful than she is? Heaven and earth are at her mercy. [. . .] And to a greater or lesser degree,

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businessmen through the ages have probably turned to her for help — but not until today has anyone been able to exploit her divine power deliberately and rationally. The triumph of secularisation! The triumph of advertising!22 The reduction of the goddess to an evocative figure tempting passers-by with tweeds, lace and silks in a shop window is a pointer to the reification of woman in the capitalist, urbanised society which is the world of Astarte. A strikingly ironic chapter on women's socialisation, revolving around the stereotyped roles offered by the increasingly popular weeklies, is followed by a no less ironical study of the attitudes of a group of men who define woman either as a chimera — whom they prefer to remain an illusion — or as 'seasoning which you cannot do without, although the best bit is before you've had her'.23 By tracing the development of three young people, with the only man among them employed on a popular weekly where he selects serials and short stories for a chiefly female audience, the narrative highlights the extent to which the roles available to women are the products of a male-dominated system, its manifestations of culture uniformly one-sided, superficial and exploitative as the mere products of capitalist greed that they are. An alternative is then offered, with Karin Boye's novel and its emphatically feminine signature emerging as an antithetical manifestation of culture. Among the most notable features of the narrative are the ritual patterns that endow it with a distinctive rhythm. The focal point, inevitably, is the goddess of love, admittedly reduced to a dummy in a shop window but still at the centre of attention, 'imbibing with pleasure [. . .] [the] morning prayers' of the women office workers passing by.24 At one level, the phrase is ironical, yet the needs of the worshippers are real enough. A parallel pattern is established in the chapter depicting cinema-goers flocking to enjoy the latest release with the famous Bel Bird; significantly, the chapter is entitled 'Sakrament' ('Sacrament'). The role of ritual is further underlined in chapters such as 'Elden och altaret' ('The Fire and the Altar), about a sixteen-year-old girl dreaming in front of seductive shop windows, and 'Invigning' ('Initiation'), about a man taking advantage of a young woman's sexual inexperience. Gunilla Domellof reads these

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ritual patterns purely in the context of cynical manipulation: exploited as they are by a male-dominated, capitalist system, their outcome in Astarte is death rather than the safeguarding of life.25 I perceive the implications of these patterns in more ambivalent terms, the element of manipulation clashing with the profound and frequently collective needs on which they focus. It is not only the goddess-turned-dummy who is multiplied by having her gesture repeated by a number of female characters in the novel: the ritual patterns also open up for that multiplicity which the narrative's other cultural manifestations so palpably lack. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, discerned the roots of religion in social structures. At one stage, religion pervaded everything social to the extent that the two terms were synonymous,26 but to Durkheim the period when he was writing was 'a stage of transition and moral mediocrity'.27 The dummy in the novel is characterised as 'A goddess in degradation',28 but the potential of the ritual patterns, especially in terms of the submerged powers of the social collective, points towards a possible renewal. Beneath and behind the shallow uniformity of contemporary culture, we can thus glimpse a reviving multiplicity, its origins stemming from the very text of the novel. For all literature, as Karin Boye once observed, contains 'a drop of religion, because it is connected with those powers that renew and shape our souls and through us the world in which we live'.29 By contrast, Karin Boye's second novel, Merit vaknar (Merit Awakes, 1933), is a far more conventional work. But this realist novel, depicting the experiences of a middle-aged widow who has shut herself away from the present to live in an ideal world made up of memories of her husband and her marriage, deals explicitly with a radical change of perspective, with the kind of awakening to a new approach to the universe required from readers of Astarte. It is possible to discern a dialectic relationship between Karin Boye's novels: while her first and third and fifth novels are boldly innovatory works, her second and fourth, which are much more traditional in design, explore, with a clarity that is almost pedagogical, the problems involved in changing a personal perspective and way of life. Initially a typical example of woman as an object, a product of patriarchal society, Merit uncovers the truth about her husband's past and is driven by the process towards

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a fuller understanding of her self and her social context. Merit's new openness, her readiness to embrace life in its multitude of forms, makes her, towards the end of the novel, into an implicitly ideal reader of one of Karin Boye's modernist texts such as the earlier Astarte or her next novel, Kris (Crisis, 1934). Traditionally, Crisis has been read in autobiographical terms, with even a recent analysis such as that of GuniUa Domellof concentrating on the autobiographical elements. However, this female Entwcklungsroman has challenging^ wide implications, most notably as a result of its radical form, which puzzled the reviewers,30 and the depth and extent of its analysis, which uses the difficult transition from woman-as-object to woman-as-subject as the focal point for a far-reaching cultural critique. Crisis is also characterised by a remarkable freshness and an almost painful urgency, the unflinching honesty of its explorations making for a rare thoroughness in its analysis. The narrative of Crisis is made up of sections of vastly differing length, with headings attached only to three dialogical portions of the text. But these dialogues, 'Om sunda ideal' ('On Healthy Ideals'), 'Om de fromma ordens betydelse' ('On the Significance of Pious Words'), and 'Om Malin Forst' ('On Malin Forst'), highlight a dialogical structure which pervades the work, the contrasting versions circumscribing, yet failing to pinpoint, the central character until she begins to emerge, in a dialectic contrast to her previous status as an object, as a subject in her own right. She can then be seen to be of a piece with the previously evasive multiplicity, the form thus effectively anticipating the development of the central character. Perceived in a wider context, the form simultaneously calls into question the conventional unity of the humanist subject,31 challenging the coherence of a patriarchal world view in particular. Making great demands on the reader's active co-operation - and thus setting up a dialogue at a different level — the form of the novel ultimately points towards a new concept of the world, the inclusion of the feminine perspective making for balance as well as renewal. Malin Forst, the central character in Crisis, is 20 years old and in the midst of a one-year course at a teacher training college. But she turns out to be trapped as her religious fervour persuades her to make extreme demands on herself while simultaneously blotting her out as an individual. Indeed, Malin's recurring prayer concerns

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the annihilation of her own will for the sake of the will of God.32 The impact of the word of God is paralleled, in more mundane terms, by a scene at the family dinner table where Malin succumbs to her father's Voice of cold willpower',33 a scene which in turn results in her visit to a no less patriarchal psychiatrist who slots women into stereotyped moulds and offers Malin nothing but some medicine for her anemia. In the empty space created by Malin's lack of a sense of identity, psychoanalytical dimensions expand and vie for supremacy, the most notable version of this conflict being the game of chess between White and Black, will and desire or, in Freud's terms, the Ego and the Id.34 This dialectical confrontation typifies the extremism that imbues this novel with a unique tension as each position is explored to its limits. But Malin, significantly, lacks a language in which to express her inner turmoil and sense of fragmentation. She can only burst into tears, as happens both at the dinner table and in the psychiatrist's consulting room: Had she really no other language left but tears? [. . .] As monotonous, as incomprehensible as the hesitant sounds of a deaf-mute . . . Her tears did not bring relief as they fell, like rain or dew, they were ejected by a superhuman pressure like a geyser, like a hot flood, throwing itself in vain towards a merciful heaven that is too distant. A language that no one could interpret.35 For Malin, the transformation is initiated by her discovery of Siv, a fellow student whose beauty combines with a distinct personality to make her the object of Malin's love at a distance. As Gunilla Domellof has pointed out, this relationship between two women issues an unmistakable challenge to the patriarchal system,36 reinforced by the fact that another woman friend confirms Malin's new perspective on the world and thus assists in her emergence as a subject.37 This decisive change is underlined by the appearance, in what is broadly speaking a third person narrative, of a short section in the first person. This section is followed immediately by the second dialogue, 'On the Significance of Pious Words', singled out by Karin Boye as central to the novel.38 In this dialogue, a monk argues with a priest about major Christian concepts, claiming that solely scriptural interpretations have the effect of distorting and reducing their meaning and that

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the example of the individual human being, radiating spiritual experience, is superior. As the horrified priest details his objections, pointing out to the monk that his heretical views threaten to undermine not only Christian knowledge of the identity of God but the very significance of the church,39 phallogocentrism is palpably called into question. And language remains central to Malin's development. Her increasingly blatant disobedience takes shape in a poetically proportioned vision in which Lucifer, symbol of the eternal rebel, confronts figures of authority from Malin's past. The experience of love teaches Malin to read the language of her senses and of the objects around her, love making the world in its fullness and multiplicity anew for her as it once did for the speaker in a well-known poem by the eighteenth-century writer Johan Henrik Kellgren, entitled 'Den nya skapelsen' ('The New Creation').40 This renewal through language culminates in the formal celebrations at the end of the academic year which clearly have a ritual significance,41 but which also illustrate the role of poetry and music with their semiotic rhythms in helping to define Malin's sense of self.42 This powerfully feminine sense of self ultimately transcends all conventional boundaries. The final dialogue, 'On Malin Forst', establishes a crucial perspective on the development of the central character by offering a range of more or less one-sided and myopic comments on her experience, ironically underlining the extent and implications of the transformation that has taken place. And with fascism having come to the fore in Germany only the year before Crisis was published, the feminine focus of the novel's cultural critique could be seen as not only radical but provocative. LATER WORKS

Karin Boye's fourth book of poetry, For trddets skull (For the Sake of the Tree), which appeared in 1935, is often regarded as her greatest achievement in this genre. Radiating a sense of self parallel to that which emerges so powerfully in Crisis, For the Sake of the Tree, however, attracted much negative criticism from contemporary reviewers, chiefly because of the extensive use of modernist form and boldly unconventional imagery.43 But other critics were able to appreciate the poet's skill in developing these elements as vehicles for an honest and exceptionally far-reaching

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search for truth; as Margit Abenius has put it, the poetry in this volume 'moves in the border area between death and renewal'.44 For the Sake of the Tree contains some of Karin Boye's most remarkable love poetry, one example being 'Nattens djupa violoncell' ('The Deep Cello of the Night'), which is also one of her foremost contributions to the Swedish modernist tradition. In this poem, first published in 1932 in the journal Spektrum, the precision in the use of rhythm and sounds results in an evocative balancing act into a new world, the dissolution of the conventional perspectives provoked by the ecstatic affinity with a fellow human being: The deep cello of the night flings its dark exultation over the wide expanses. The misty images of the objects dissolve their forms in floods of cosmic light. Breakers, brilliant and long, wash in wave upon wave through nightblue eternity. You! You! You!45 Equally radical is the rewriting of the world in 'Mogen som en frukt' ('Ripe as a Fruit') with its celebration of a luscious maturity, of a piece with the speaker's confidence in a self that is not only distinct but also knows itself to be desirable - and thus the focal point of a new world. By far the best-known example in For the Sake of the Tree of the characteristically Boyean theme of the affinity between humankind and the green world is the poem which begins: Of course it hurts when buds open. Why else would spring hesitate?46 Originally entitled 'Till Elin Wagner' ('To Elin Wagner'), this poem first appeared in a publication put together for Karin Boye's older colleague on her fiftieth birthday in 1932. Subsequently retitled 'Ja visst gor det ont', after its opening words, the poem, about the fear of change and about trust in the creative processes of nature, has become one of Karin Boye's most familiar texts. However, in the significantly entitled For the Sake of the Tree, this identification with nature turns out to have new and alarming implications. In the central poem called 'Tradet under jorden'

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('The Tree Beneath the Ground'), the fully developed tree, complete with branches and leaves, is depicted as buried and choking in heavy soil: Anxiety follows me. It trickles from the ground. In it a tree is in agony beneath heavy layers of soil. Oh wind! Oh sunlight! Feel the agony: the promises of the scent of paradise miracles.47 The identification with the green world is as crucial as ever, but in the last instance this particular tree, unlike other vegetation, lacks the freedom to grow and develop. The totality and force of this identification — A tree is growing under ground; a mirage is haunting me, a song of living glass, of burning silver48 — make for an exceptionally powerful insight into the consequences of this stunting of life, palpably conveying the violation and indeed perversion involved. The multiplicity of nature has begun to spawn a language outlining a new world, but on the threshold we are held back, almost forcibly reminded of the continuing power of phallogocentrism. The paradise may be in sight, but it is not yet within reach. For the Sake of the Tree contains several major illustrations of this crucial conflict. Other important examples are 'Min hud ar full av fjarilar' ('My Skin is Full of Butterflies'), which sets up an evocative contrast with the trapped eagles that the speaker harbours within — 'And between their claws writhe, white as shoots in a cellar, / the sinews of my innermost self49 — and 'Bon till solen' ('Prayer to the Sun') with its plea for the safeguarding of that uprightness which the human being shares with plants and trees. The innovations with regard to form and language that characterise both Crisis and For the Sake of the Tree are thrown into relief by the traditionalism of Karin Boye's fourth novel, For lite (Too Little, 1936). With great clarity and consistency this text explores a narrow and conventional perspective, a life in which the predominance of caution and a sense of duty has resulted in bitterness

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and frustration. Significantly, the character leading this blinkered existence is a man, at one time a promising young writer but subsequently reduced to producing texts for the popular weeklies. Although he temporarily discerns wider perspectives thanks to his renewed acquaintance with a woman sculptor who has gone on to become a successful artist, and whose work brings out the feminine dimension of the multiplicity that is central to so many of Karin Boye's texts, the male writer returns to his confined existence. Having failed himself and his art, he has also, by implication, turned his back on non-conventional texts of the kind which form such an important part of Karin Boye's oeuvre. Karin Boye's last novel, Kallocain (1940), is the only one of her works to have gained an international reputation, having appeared in German (1947), French (1947) and English (1966) as well as in several other languages, including the Scandinavian ones. When Kallocain was first published, its dystopian World State was often perceived as echoing aspects of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union; and in discussions of the background of the novel, Karin Boye's spell in Germany in 1932 and her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 have often been emphasised. But the novel also belongs to a distinct literary tradition, represented by works such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and, less famously but no less important in this context, We by the Russian author Evgenii Zamiatin, a novel written in the early 1920s and first published, in an English version, in 1924. Karin Boye had read Zamiatin50 - and, presumably, also Huxley; and, playing as it does on the conflict between a ruthlessly authoritarian system and humankind's desire for a sense of genuine community, freedom and creativity, Kallocain can be seen to have a number of intriguing similarities with both Zamiatin's and Huxley's novels. In Sweden, moreover, the dystopian tradition had been explored only a few years earlier by Par Lagerkvist, whose I den tiden (At that Time, 1935) contains a couple of sharply satirical short stories set in a militaristic and non-democratic future. Inevitably, Kallocain has been linked to the author's personal plight, with the poet Gunnar Ekelof describing it as 'a cruel and strangely, almost unconsciously matter-of-fact horror picture of [Karin Boye's] own situation in life'.51 But Kallocain clearly also needs to be read in a wider context: as Karin Boye had suggested

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in a rhetorical question in her 1936 article about T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, 'does not always the power of the prophetic voice stem from the fusion of that which is most profoundly personal with that which is most universal?'.52 Kallocain is subtitled 'Roman fran 2000-talet' ('Novel of the 21st Century'). Its central character, the chemist Leo Kail, is resident with his wife Linda and their two youngest children in Chemistry City No. 4. Their eight-year-old son has already left home — a flat in a subterranean block — for the children's camp with its military training, and his parents regularly spend evenings and nights on military duty. The citizens of the World State, known as fellow soldiers, are supervised at all times by the police, but when Leo Kail invents a truth drug — named kallocain after him - the extent of the control of the state becomes limitless. 'You can be sentenced for your very thoughts', the newspaper proclaims.53 The ritual patterns which are part of this authoritarian regime can be read as instances of cynical manipulation.54 A spring-time farewell party for a group of young girls, their labour required elsewhere in the World State, turns out to be complete with dramatic sketches, music and a communal meal; but the celebrations precede a total and definite separation, with the young girls about to be sent to unknown destinations and all communication banned. Similarly, the Voluntary Sacrificial Service, on whose members Leo Kail becomes dependent for testing the effects of kallocain, turns out to be made up of fellow soldiers who have been persuaded to sacrifice their bodies and minds for the communal good; but to the authorities, they are first and foremost guinea-pigs for experiments with new weapons of destruction. However, as in Astarte, the ritual patterns also contain additional dimensions, reaching beyond the control of the authorities. Perceived in this light, the ritual patterns in Kallocain, as in Karin Boye's first novel, point towards a genuine capacity for social cohesion and regeneration, illustrated by the encounter, during the carefully orchestrated farewell party, of a young girl and a boy who end up standing 'in the midst of the clamour as if on a quiet rocky island, oblivious of space and time'.55 But the ritual patterns in Kallocain also advance a step further, highlighting, in line with Durkheim's argument, the affinity between religious experience and the social structure. Leo Kail's first human guinea-pig, No. 135 from the Voluntary Sacrificial

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Service, excites the envy of the chemist with his description of his most precious experience, his enrolment, with others from the Youth Camp, in the Voluntary Sacrificial Service: And when you looked at the person next to you, you could hardly believe that you were looking at a human being any more. Their faces, you see. Like fire. Not like flesh and blood. Holy, divine.56 These subversive implications of the ritual patterns are further expanded by the novel's symbolism with its focus on vegetation and organic growth, in sharp contrast to the rigid militarism and preparation for war that predominate in the World State. Kallocain has been described as 'a lampoon against politics, against male-dominated society and duty, for "the tree", for that which is vegetative and passive and yet productive';57 and the symbolism is central to this effect. The vegetative imagery first surfaces after Leo Kali's drug has unveiled a secret sect, whose lack of organisation and explicit purpose confounds the chemist and his supervisor as they listen to one of its members: That which is organic does not need to be organised. [. . .] We are built from within like trees, and bridges grow between us which are not made from dead matter or dead necessity. Life emanates from us. Death is immanent in you.58 Other members of the sect reinforce the feminine focus of this imagery, inspiring a dream of Leo Kail's imbued with powerfully maternal symbolism;59 but the epitome of this central cluster of symbols turns out to be Linda, the chemist's wife. Indeed, it is possible to see Leo Kali's sense of inadequacy in this relationship as the driving force behind his invention of the truth drug60 — and it is equally significant that kallocain fails to give him access to Linda. Only when she emerges as a subject, speaking of her own free will, does the extent of her affinity with organic life become apparent, the focal point being her last pregnancy: Inside me a being was evolving — it already had features — it had an identity - and I couldn't change them I was a blossoming bough, who knew nothing of my root and trunk, 61 but I could feel the sap rising from unknown depths

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In the last instance, this revolutionary insight permeates Leo Kali's entire account. In a World State where art has not survived although films are still made for propaganda purposes - the story which the chemist writes down turns out to be structured in accordance with the pattern of ancient comedy, the sequence involving male rivalry, a symbolic descent to hell followed by a return to life, a ritual marriage and the defeat of the rival, culminating in his expulsion as a scapegoat.62 Leo Kail writes his story as a prisoner chemist, after the conquest of the World State by the Universal State; but the multiple ritual patterns, along with the symbolism of his story, confirm the strength and regenerative powers of subversive communities which will continue to undermine the authoritarianism of the state. Kallocain, which appeared the year before Elin Wagner's Alarm Clock, is one of the major feminist pacifist novels in Swedish literature this century. The relentless vividness of the description of life in the World State makes for an emphatic dialectic contrast, with the text opening up perspectives into the unknown: 'Perhaps', Linda has said in her final speech to Leo Kail, 'a new world will evolve, peopled by mothers — by those who are men and those who are women, by those who have borne children and those who have not'.63 Karin Boye's vision, remarkably consistent and clearly also highly controversial at a time when Hitler was at the height of his power, continued to be most boldly realised in her poetry. In De sju db'dssynderna och andra efterldmnade skrifterr (The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Posthumous Works, 1941), the poems about growth and love appear side by side with poems about death. The taut, original rhythms have the effect of playing down the remaining regularities of the metre and bringing out the exhilarating novelty of the worlds envisioned, entered and tentatively explored. For, as Karin Boye had pointed out in a diary entry in 1921, You do not become happy because you have reached a certain point. Steady development,movement, brings happiness.64 Karin Boye's work can be read as a testimony to this urge for challenge and renewal, the resulting fluidity and multiplicity — the extent and implications of which are only now becoming apparent — adding to the dimensions of this major modernist oeuvre.

7 Moa Martinson (1890-1964) THE WRITER AND HER CRITICS

The opening chapter of Moa Martinson's first published novel, Kvinnor och dppeltrcid (Women and Apple Trees, 1933), set in a nineteenth-century farming community, depicts two middle-aged women who are enjoying regular baths together in the wash-house at one of the farms. Exploring as it does the appearance of the not so young female body in the context of female life experience - one of the women has given birth to fifteen children - and an atmosphere of sisterly affinity, the chapter can be read as an antithesis to the bathing scenes that abound in the texts of male Swedish modernists of this period, scenes in which the outdoor settings frame young and desirable female bodies objectified by the male gaze.1 Moa Martinson's bathing women inevitably become the focus of suspicion and slander, the relentless persecution driving the mother of fifteen to suicide. This public resistance, within the text, to its central motif has been interpreted as a deliberate pointer to the critical reaction: perhaps, Ebba Witt-Brattstrom has suggested, Moa Martinson 'wanted to anticipate a reception which she could foresee'.2 With her working-class background and her radical political affiliations, with the syndicalist movement and communism as well as with feminism and pacifism, Moa Martinson, born in 1890, is a product of a rapidly changing Sweden, the only woman among the 'proletarian' writers who emerged in the 1930s. But while her male colleagues were soon accepted by the literary establishment, Moa Martinson was to remain an outsider. A standard handbook of Swedish literature such as Erik Hjalmar Linder's Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet (1966) dismisses Moa Martinson by means of cliches such as 'the cheerful chronicler of misery' and 'the bright splash of colour in the naturalism of the thirties'.3 She is generally regarded as lacking in artistic refinement and the

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skills of composition: her narrative, claims Gunnar Brandell, is 'artless' and 'often chaotic'.4 In a few of her books, he discerns evidence that she 'could have become a real writer if reality with all its intrusions had left her sufficient peace';5 as it is, she could only draw on her natural, uncultivated talent. Even the most recent English-language survey of Swedish literature, Ingemar Algulin's A History of Swedish Literature (1989), which does treat Moa Martinson's oeuvre in somewhat more positive terms, insists on giving her a minimum of space: while Harry Martinson, her husband for eleven years, receives 4 J£ pages, Moa Martinson gets a mere 11 lines.6 The critical disapproval, which has predominated well into the 1970s and beyond, has been coupled with an exceptional popularity among the reading public. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Moa Martinson's books were reprinted in cheap editions; and her works remain among the most widely bought, borrowed and read in the national literature of Sweden.7 But only comparatively recently has there been a notable shift in the critical attitude to Moa Martinson's texts — a shift initiated by feminist critics. Maria Bergom-Larsson explored the work of Moa Martinson in three articles in the liberal daily Dagens Nyheter in the autumn of 1975, expanding the articles into an essay published the following year. Second-wave feminism provides her framework, with Moa Martinson emerging as an 'older sister' to whom Swedish women of the 1970s need to listen,8 an author whose understanding of issues such as feminine solidarity and the class struggle constitutes an important contribution to women's history and culture. Tracing Moa Martinson's narrative art to an oral tradition, Maria Bergom-Larsson was also able to highlight the significance of the multi-focused, centrifugal structures of the texts which she read as conveying on-going processes rather than neatly finished plots.9 Ebba. Witt-Brattstrom, in an essay which dates from 1981 and whose title is a quotation from Moa Martinson, 'Lita pa en karl, man skulle ha stryk' ('Trust a Man - You Ought to Get a Good Hiding'), similarly emphasised the role of her oeuvre for second-wave feminism; but she also succeeded in illuminating Moa Martinson's texts in relation to the work of her contemporaries, discerning elements of feminine difference which, she argued, stemmed from the author's attempts to formulate experience

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beyond the confines of the conventional form of the novel.10 Many of these observations were expanded in Ebba Witt-Brattstrom's study of some of Moa Martinson's major works, Moa Martinson. Skrift och drift i trettiotalet (Moa Martinson: Text and Desire in the Thirties, 1988). Highlighting the dynamic relationship between the texts of Moa Martinson and those of her male contemporaries, Ebba Witt-Brattstrom, drawing on French psycholinguistic theory, has painted a picture of a highly conscious, innovative and refined novelist. Moa Martinson was born near the town of Norrkoping, some distance south-east of Stockholm, the daughter of a 19-year-old unmarried worker in the textile industry, Kristina Swartz. The young girl was named Helga Maria and spent her first seven years boarded out with relatives or foster parents. In 1897 her mother married, but Helga's stepfather was prone to drinking and the life of the family was to be marked by extensive poverty and almost constant moves. Helga's schooling was extremely patchy, yet she achieved top marks when she left at the age of twelve, and as a teenager she was writing poetry. At the age of fifteen she found her first job; a year later, she worked in a restaurant kitchen at the Norrkoping Art and Industry Exhibition; and during the following winter she trained as a cold buffet manageress in Stockholm. At the age of twenty she married a labourer and moved to his small cottage in Osmo in Sormland, south of Stockholm, giving birth to five sons between 1910 and 1916. Like her mother before her, she struggled to contain the family's extreme poverty, aggravated by her husband's drinking habits. She succeeded, however, in developing her political interests, opening up her home to political meetings and being elected, in 1922, as a local Social Democrat councillor. Her first article was published in the same year; and over the next decade, she was to refine her writing skills in a wide range of articles for the radical press. In her contributions to Tidevarvet, the radical women's weekly for which she started to write when Elin Wagner was the editor, Ebba Witt-Brattstrom has discerned extensive preparatory work for her breakthrough as a writer of fiction;11 and the course which Moa Martinson attended in the spring of 1928 at the Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad turned out to be a pivotal experience:

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Here I began using new strata of my brain. What I had read on my own at home turned out to be useful. What I was talking about was met with understanding. [ . . . ] ! had big gaps in my education with regard to literature and other academic subjects. But there were big gaps in the knowledge of those who were educated too, with regard to society and ordinary people, so things evened themselves out.12 Moa Martinson's political activism and early writing developed against the background of major upheavals in her personal life. In the spring of 1925, two of her sons drowned; and three years later her husband committed suicide. In 1929 Harry Martinson, a poor, young and as yet unknown poet, came to stay in her cottage. The couple subsequently married, to be divorced eleven years later. This relationship with another major twentieth-century writer has added further distortions to the critical image of Moa Martinson: in the light of her husband's modernist experimentation, many commentators have emphasised what they have perceived as Moa Martinson's lack of sophistication, highlighting the role of her husband's influence on the development of her work. Ebba Witt-Brattstrom, on the other hand, discerns a mutual influence in which Moa Martinson played a major role in the development of her husband's work, reflected most notably in Harry Martinson becoming the only feminist among the 'primitivists' of the 1930s.13 Moa Martinson's first novel appeared in 1933, and over the next 25 years she was to publish fifteen novels, two volumes of short stories, one collection of poetry, a couple of autobiographical works and numerous articles. 'Moa' had been her pseudonym since the late 1920s, the name originating from a novel by the Danish author Johannes V. Jensen, Brceen (The Glacier, 1908), in which it designates the first ancestress of humankind. Frank, quick-witted and fond of shocking her audiences, Moa Martinson developed in the 1940s and 1950s into a major public figure, a kind of'mother of the people'.14 With a notable pride and self-assurance she stressed, in her prefaces to the reprints of her works in the 1950s, both her proletarian origins and her strong rapport with her audience.

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EARLY NOVELS

One of the most powerful scenes in Women and Apple Trees depicts a woman giving birth. Left to cope on her own she lies on the floor, stifling her screams for the sake of the other children. Having torn the membranes with her fingers she delivers the baby, immediately turning him round for You are born with your face to the ground. By your own strength you must soar to higher spheres, and you do, but the earth takes you even so. Maybe the earth itself is soaring to higher spheres.15 The quotation encapsulates an antithesis that pervades Moa Martinson's novels. Her characters are tied to the earth, dependent on a soil that is only waiting to engulf them and which, at one extreme, is synonymous with chaos. In contrast to this inevitability, the texts lift the characters out of the threat of anonymity and oblivion, highlighting their desire not only for improvements to their material situation but also for order, purity and beauty. Moa Martinson's characters are dignified by the narrative. 'I am', the author has said, 'ambitious on behalf of the people I depict';16 and her reaction when criticised for the grey ordinariness and physical poverty of her characters is similarly illuminating: 'I felt I had brought more disgrace down upon these people than they were having to bear already'.17 Against the background of a devouring chaos, Moa Martinson's narrative also stands out in sharp relief, all important as it performs its most immediate task of endowing potentially anonymous figures with an identity and an aura of dignity, but immensely fragile too. With its affinities with life as well as death, the maternal body strikingly encompasses the antithesis central to Moa Martinson's texts. In Women and Apple Trees and its sequel, Sallys soner (Sally's Sons, 1934), the maternal body constitutes not only the main theme but also the structuring principle of the narrative18. As a result, some of the topoi beloved by many male authors of the period are inflected according to radically new paradigms;19 and the overall form assumes a challenging openness as the plot moves beyond the fate of individual characters, the main principle of composition deriving instead from the female body at different stages of the life cycle.

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The opening scene in the wash-house emphatically reclaims the female body from a host of contemporary texts by men. The male gaze is allowed a glimpse, but into an unfathomable mystery: Then Fredrika opens the washhouse door. She stands naked outside the doorway while the cold air whirls around her like a cloud. Big and stately and white, she shimmers ghostlike against the dark January sky, and the farmer stands frozen, doesn't know what to think. Never before has he beheld a naked woman.20 The mystery is developed by Mother Sofi, the mother of fifteen children and the central character in the chapter: Mother Sofi, little and thin, would look like a pitiful plucked hen if it weren't for her sparkling eyes and curly, light hair. Her mouth is sunken, and the wrinkles beginning to show in her energetic, firm little face. Her breasts hang like two small, loose sacks from having nursed so many eager little mouths. The touchingly thin body, which was like a girl's, was more graceful than any of her daughters' when she wore a dress. It resembled a curious living rune stone when her clothes came off. Her stomach was one single scar, knot against knot, scar against scar, with big, broad, shimmering streaks here and there.21 It has been pointed out that this description challenges the conventional cliches about the middle-aged woman — her similarity to a 'pitiful plucked hen', her sunken mouth, the lines in her face — by means of the juxtapositions with positive adjectives: 'sparkling' eyes; 'curly, light' hair; 'energetic, firm' little face.22 With its parallel contrasts, Mother Sofi's stomach becomes the focal point of this portrait, a metaphor such as a 'living rune stone' indicative of the mythical proportions of this mother figure, 'an Old Norse version of the Venus of Willendorf, as Ebba Witt-Brattstrom puts it.23 And yet, Mother Sofi is driven to take her life. The fate of Mother Sofi can be read as anticipating that of Sally,24 the woman who is alone when giving birth. Sally is a descendant of Mother Sofi, living during the early decades of the twentieth century. In the figure of Sally, the problem of the maternal body is taken to its extreme: tied by the biological demands of her body, just like her ancestress, Sally is also a product of a new era, a political individual fighting for social and economic justice.

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Faced with the task of bringing up six children largely on her own in a small, isolated cottage where there is rarely enough food and no means to provide the children with any clothes beyond the ones they stand up in, Sally emerges as one of Moa Martinson's monumental women characters — strong, resourceful and intrepid. She opens the cottage to political meetings; and only four days after having given birth and still in bed, she confronts two representatives of the establishment who are demanding rent, forcing them to back down by reading them a text which describes the owners of property as a 'mold and fungus on the surface of the earth'.25 One interpretation of Sally's radicalism is that it is inspired by ideas that Moa Martinson had encountered at the Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad; but Sally, significantly, challenges the bourgeois framework of these ideas, exposing them instead to a crucial test in a proletarian context.26 Sally's friend Ellen, who is similarly a descendant of Mother Sofi, illustrates a different variety of idealism. Her husband, who spends long periods working away from home, is prone to drinking; but in the cottage in the forest where Ellen comes to live with her fatherin-law she finds peace and fulfilment in an almost prelapsarian harmony and beauty. With its apple and pear trees this cottage, built by Ellen's father-in-law for the wife he loved, becomes a focal point for the element of fairytale and mystery which is a powerful ingredient in much of Moa Martinson's work. Ellen, whose mother died when she was a small child and who has grown up in the squalor of an urban environment which she has perceived as threatening and merciless, finds her dream of perfection realised in her kind, quiet father-in-law with his neat cottage, its garden and the paradisical wilderness surrounding it. This, too, is an antithesis to disorder and chaos, but lacking all political dimensions. One of Moa Martinson's very best descriptions of nature occurs here, the product of the old man's happiness after his youngest son's arrival with Ellen, his feelings sharpening his senses and achieving a new affinity with the world of the woodcock and the capercaillie, the fox and the grass-snake, with the scent of clover, meadowsweet and earth, and with the breeze of a summer's morning.27 Although Sally's and Ellen's practical sisterhood is one of the most powerful illustrations of their activism, their desire for their respective ideals is depicted against a background of threatening

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chaos. At the immediate level, this is exemplified by hunger, cold, filth and drunkenness, all of them familiar to both Sally and Ellen since childhood and enemies which they continue to fight throughout their lives. Another version of chaos is oblivion, the blotting-out of the struggle of generations of human beings until all that remains is a heap of stones among the heather and a gooseberry bush, which is all that Ellen's father-in-law finds after having undertaken the long journey back to his childhood home.28 But in Women and Apple Trees the most palpable version of chaos is war. The First World War is raging while Sally is giving birth alone; and her thoughts about the slaughter that is taking place while she is bringing a new life into the world coalesce into a powerful pacifist statement: She knows some newspapers praise expectant mothers who want to give birth for the cause - they are fearless, they love their country. [. . .] [She] thinks it is impossible to exist in this world, it is impossible to live. Tomorrow, tomorrow! Tomorrow I will be alone, alone with this last baby, this last soldier. Never give birth again. Never. For who can live and give birth to a child in cannon thunder and poverty. Give birth while the shells explode.29 With her father having been employed at a cannon foundry, Sally feels guilty of having participated in the preparations for the war. Her insight into the wrongs of extracting iron from the earth and turning it into machinery and cannon — 'Man should not misuse things'30 — has a touch of her friend Ellen's prelapsarian ideals. Sally, however, ultimately deserts her ideals: in an attempt to guarantee the financial security of her children she marries a wealthy farmer, but her new-won safety stifles her, and she dies during the birth of their first child. The maternal body poses a seemingly insoluble problem a's Sally succumbs to those inevitable dimensions of her situation above which she has been struggling to rise. The structure and style of the narrative capture this complex antithesis, the patterns of repetition and deviation foregrounding the narrative as it winds its way from the beginning to its inevitable end. I find Peter Brooks's Freudian reading of narrative, as presented in Reading for the Plot (1984), relevant here. His argument, inspired by Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is

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that the repetitions and detours, including the plot itself, are at once steps towards an inevitable end and the expressions of unquenchable desires: 'Between these two moments of quiescence [the beginning and the end], plot itself stands as a kind of divergence or deviance, a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate'.31 In Women and Apple Trees, the unconventional plot repeatedly surprises the reader. The opening chapter turns out to stand more or less on its own; the story of Sally is begun, only to be interrupted by the story of Ellen; and many of the threads of the plot remain untied at the end. With the maternal body, the text's structuring principle, epitomising the tension between desire and inevitability, the pattern is also evident at the level of style, the repetitions often assuming the quality of highly charged refrains. These are the conditions of some of society's anonymous members, the text seems to say. And this fragile narrative is the only vehicle available for telling their story. But their story must be told. Two other early novels by Moa Martinson, Rdgvakt (Rye Watch, 1935) and Drottning Grdgyllen (Queen Greygolden, 1937), expand, albeit in very different ways, on some of the central preoccupations of Women and Apple Trees and Sally's Sons. At the immediate level, Rye Watch is a celebration of a nineteenth-century farm labourer, a man whose first name remains unknown and whose surname, mentioned a third of the way into the narrative, is virtually never used — a man, in short, who would have been engulfed by oblivion but for the monument erected by the text. He has begun his working life as a ten-year-old, lashing the pairs of oxen working the huge fields on an estate belonging to the Crown. Like all the other farmhands, he has found his existence determined by the demands of the soil and the elements. The 'rye watch' of the title is only one example: during the nights of late June frosts, the workers on the estate have to run alongside the fields of rye, stretching between them lengths of rope which, by touching the ears of corn, prevent the frost from damaging them. The relentless cycle of the soil reduces the individual human being to insignificance, the demands of life separating families, imposing silences, resulting in people disappearing for good. The boy who lashes the oxen subsequently becomes a leading farmhand, but he never learns to write and his reading skills remain

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limited. With some assistance he once reads a picture story of the Passion, and as a result perspectives open up: everyday objects and animals assume new dimensions and he perceives himself, albeit only vaguely, as part of an overall context. Similarly, Moa Martinson's narrative provides all-important perspectives, her depiction of the farmhand — one of the most affectionate portraits of a male character to be found in her work - opening up for the resonances, the mythical patterns of his hard life. To his niece, Sigrid, he becomes 'life's fairytale and adventure'.32 Sigrid — whose role has been anticipated from the very beginning when the young boy is referred to as 'Sigrid's uncle' — belongs to a different generation, being politically active and a local councillor. But her roots are a prerequisite for her activism. In providing a close-up of these roots, Rye Watch simultaneously highlights their proximity to obliteration. Roots are significant in Queen Greygolden too, but within the context of a more conspicuous framework of fairytale and myth. Queen Greygolden is one of Moa Martinson's most evocative texts, a novel in which a distant past fuses with the nineteenth century, pagan customs with Christian ones, and concrete reality with the realm of tradition and story. More suggestively than any other text by Moa Martinson, this novel highlights the role of dreams, tales and visions as the reflections of humankind's craving for the ideals of coherence and perfection. Here the 1930s modernist is obscured by an author with strong Romantic leanings. Within the narrative's patterns of growth and decay, of life and death, the two women at the centre of the plot emerge as types rather than individuals. They come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but with poignant inevitability their lives are interwoven. The beautiful Klara, her black hair reaching down to her feet, has had to go out to work at the age of twelve to enable her parents to feed and clothe her younger brothers and sisters. Miss Matilde, on the other hand, comes from an upper-class background; and her appearance, distorted as it is by her hunchback and a large goitre, makes the local children insist that she is a witch. The desire of these women, for the same man and for the ideal world of myth, creates an affinity which becomes a structuring principle. The man they love, the enigmatic foreigner called Gragyllen (Greygolden), remains inaccessible to

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both of them, his air of mystery reminiscent of a bewitched prince in a fairytale.33 Similarly, the tale that unites them is a search for perfection: the chronicle about the ancient elk tribe of the forest, which Miss Matilde's father reads aloud with his daughter and Klara among the audience, can be interpreted as a critique of civilisation, a challenge to the worship of machines and technology in the inter-war years. More importantly, however, the chronicle symbolises the simultaneous necessity and fragility of dreams and ideals. Part of a rapidly changing social system, Miss Matilde is anxious to safeguard the world of ideals. For her father, author of the chronicle about the elk tribe, she buys a real castle in the hope of liberating his imagination. Ideals, however, are not to be confined; and Miss Matilde fails to help her father just as she fails to become the wife of Gragyllen. Klara, by contrast, is alert to the elusiveness of ideals. When Miss Matilde's father reads his chronicle about the elk tribe, he hails Klara as the queen of the tribe; and as she travels to Russia with her lover, only to make her way back across Europe in destitution and on foot, she emerges as a latter-day representative of the nomadic elk tribe whose story she tells again and again. Klara, whom the story follows into her old age as she wanders throughout Scandinavia, becomes a living myth. Queen Greygolden, then, does not simply make a claim for the necessity of myth and fairytale but traces the complex and subtle emergence of these indispensable elements of human existence. THE TRILOGY ABOUT MIA AND LATER WORKS

Moa Martinson's best-known work is her trilogy about Mia, Mor giftcr sig (Mother Gets Married, 1936), Kyrkbrollop (Church Wedding, 1938), and Kungens rosor (The King's Roses, 1939). The trilogy was written as a parallel to the autobiographical novels produced in the 1930s by male proletarian writers such as Ivar Lo-Johansson (1901-1991), Jan Fridegard (1897-1968), Vilhelm Moberg (1898—1973), Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson (1904-1978). While the autobiographical novels by Moa Martinson's male contemporaries depict the struggle of young boys to free themselves from the influence of mother figures in order to assert their identity in the world at large, the close mother—daughter relationship with its glimpses of pre-Oedipal bliss is central to the

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Mia trilogy.34 At the same time, however, the books about Mia depict a young girl's path towards independence. This dualism is reflected in the narrative which can be seen to trace, at the implicit level, Mia's emergence as an author. While affirming Mia's relationship with her mother, the narrative, by its handling of events, points inexorably towards a role for the adult Mia which is very different from that of her mother. The trilogy is set in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, in and around the town of Norrkoping. Urbanisation and industrialisation are transforming the economic and political landscape. Mia, whose mother has grown up in an agricultural economy, finds herself on the borderline between two systems, her stepfather sometimes getting work as a statare ('cottar') or farmhand on some country estate, sometimes as a labourer or even as a porter in the industralised town. Employment on a farm means a host of familiar duties for Mia's mother such as milking cows and helping with the harvest and the threshing. In the agricultural economy, which is frequently perceived in a nostalgic light in Moa Martinson's texts, the tasks of men and women complement each other. In the urban economy, on the other hand, women tend to seem superfluous, with Mia's mother often being reduced to •walking from house to house asking for cleaning or washing to take on. In Moa Martinson's trilogy, the period around the turn of the century is depicted as one of insecurity and suffering. Pay and conditions are often abysmal, and Mia's stepfather frequently finds himself in one short-term job after the other. His habits of drinking heavily and sometimes leaving his wife and stepdaughter for long periods make the situation of the family even more desperate. Chaos threatens in many forms, again with poverty, resulting in hunger and cold, at the forefront. As in Moa Martinson's earlier works, the women spearhead the battle against the forces of chaos. In these novels, their contributions are so fundamental and all-pervasive that young Mia, as Maria Bergom-Larsson has pointed out, perceives the world as carried on the shoulders of women.35 And crucially the women, too, contribute the narrative tradition which moulds Mia's insight into the power of stories as a means of keeping chaos at bay. With her brutally vivid accounts of her sister who took her

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life after having been flogged and humiliated as an adult, and of her first husband who was beaten to death by his employer, Mia's grandmother illustrates this tradition. So does Mia's mother, albeit in a different key, when she describes a village of grey cottages and blossoming cherry trees to which she had walked with a relative to attend a funeral, making her daughter realise how 'a plain story about sweetness and beautiful simplicity in the midst of autumn rains and grey impossibility became a memory which stuck in my mind much better than any homework'.36 Mia's narrative project can be seen to fuse some of the central preoccupations of the women in the text. Depicting as they do Swedish working-class life around the turn of the century, these autobiographical novels combine realism with a refined narrative form which points straight into Mia's project. While the first two novels employ a first-person narrative, with young Mia's perspective particularly prominent in Mother Gets Married, the last volume is written in the third person, as if to confirm both the central character's independence and the author's grasp of the conventions of the novel. Even more strikingly, the narrative throughout employs a double chronological perspective, the focalisation shifting from that of the young Mia to that of the much more mature and experienced narrator.37 The device points up the duality of the trilogy's central project, which could be summarised as the celebration, by means of narrative, of a mother figure and the simultaneous transgression of the boundaries of her situation as a prerequisite for self-realisation and independence. The narrative of the first two novels focuses on the frequent moves, from one cheap room to another, which mould Mia's childhood. For her mother this results in repeated struggles to make shabby accommodation habitable, to eradicate the bedbugs and the cockroaches, to scrub away the dirt, and to put her stamp on the family's latest room by means of clean curtains, neat carpets and a careful arrangement of the occasional potplant. Heroic in her efforts to ensure a decent life for her daughter and herself, Mia's mother is involved in an almost constant battle against ill-health brought on by poverty and starvation, with Mia's two younger sisters both dying as small babies. Her battles for order and cleanliness constitute Mia's main bulwark against chaos, the narrative celebrating what is perhaps the greatest triumph of Mia's mother

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when the family moves, in mid-winter, to a disused wash-house which she succeeds in transforming, by means of a coat of white paint and flowers painted with blueing on the wall by the stove, into a room that becomes the envy of other families working on the farm. Mia's recurrent fear is of the collapse of this order, with her mother's pregnancies, overshadowed by sickness and exhaustion, proving to be particularly dangerous spells. Telling the story of her mother's work to hold chaos at bay, on the other hand, reinforces this crucial contribution, confirming its significance and allying the powers of narrative to the forces of order. The repeated moves result in an unmistakable textual pattern, a cycle of fresh starts only too swiftly brought to their ends. Again, I want to read this pattern in the light of Peter Brooks's Freudian interpretation of narrative; and my reading is supported by that narrator's comments on the family's moves as an illusionist trick, a carefully exploited performance: 'You are better off moving to strange places where you can dupe people for a while, be allowed to be a human being sometimes, and avoid being regarded as a wretch throughout a long life lived in the same place'.38 The variation, enhanced by the illusion, makes life less unbearable, with the narrative adding to the make-believe. Turning life into a story or a series of stories emerges as a means of coping with it. The role of narrative in asserting Mia's identity and integrity is most powerfully focused during her trip to an isolated cottage in the forest of Kolmarden. To Mia, the deep forest is bound up with fairytale and myth, the magic of the forest nourished by her mother who spent her childhood there. Mia, however, goes to the forest without her mother, travelling in the company of a neighbouring family visiting relatives. Linked, albeit indirectly, with the tradition embodied by her mother, her insight into the significance of narrative is more prominently connected with her development towards independence. The small cottage to which Mia travels is inhabited by a shoemaker, his wife and six children; and, the narrator continues: I can see still see the image of the man, standing bare-headed in the December morning with the giant fir-trees of Kolmarden behind him, with the grey, poor cottage, with the woodshed that had four of the giants of the forest for its corner posts and

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so looked even worse than woodsheds usually do, but he was looking as proud as the crowns of the fir-trees rising above the spruce-twig roof of the shed.39 The narrative celebrates the dignity of this poor family with an extraordinary vividness and conviction, highlighting not only the neatness of the children's Sunday outfits, made of plain hand-woven material, but also the atmosphere of mutual respect and love that prevails in the cottage. In this setting, Mia is able to confirm the power of narrative. Describing urban life, factories and much else unknown to the family in the forest, and thus turning her disjointed childhood into an asset that prefigures the exploitation of it in the trilogy, Mia can captivate her audience and enjoy the impact of her words. Her narrative, moreover, emerges in a literary context: the family possesses a shelf of books, and after the frugal dinner the shoemaker reads aloud from a translation of Pilgrim's Progress. Afterwards, one of the daughters reads some poetry, and so does Mia. As far back as I could remember and until I was twelve years old, this was my only literary get-together with adults during my childhood. The only time that people offered literature to visitors, really participated in what was being read aloud and enjoyed listening.40 Interestingly, Eva Adolfsson in a study of'the chronotope of the road' in Mother Gets Married has discerned more pervasive traces of Pilgrim's Progress in the novel.41 Mia's visit to Kolmarden is a pivotal experience, fundamental to the development of a sense of self that is at once drawing nourishment from narration and moulding itself on the basis of its forms. It is only logical that the first-person T becomes less prominent in the second volume in the trilogy, to disappear entirely in the third. Moa Martinson's autobiographical trilogy is not only about the childhood and adolescence of a working-class girl in turn-of-the-century Sweden: at another level, it is about an author and her material, and more particularly about her insights into the power of this material. The novels which Moa Martinson wrote in the early 1940s, Vagen under stjdrnorna (The Road beneath the Stars, 1940) and

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Brandliljor (Orange Lilies, 1941), form a frieze mapping a community throughout almost two centuries. A third novel, Livetsfest (The Celebration of Life, 1951), is more loosely connected to the milieu and characters of the earlier novels. In The Road beneath the Stars and Orange Lilies the polarity of beginning and end is enhanced by a narrative emphasis on rise and decline, an emphasis which is heightened as the second novel is added to the first, with Orange Lilies foregrounding the significance of repetition as part of its plot covers the same ground as that of The Road beneath the Stars. While the setting of the first novel is the period from 1830 to some time well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the second novel goes further back into the history of the community, starting in the 1760s and concluding in the late 1930s. As a result, the pattern of prosperity and decline affecting the big farm of Vandelhog, which is central to the narrative, becomes more pronounced; but the role of repetition, of new angles on the same material, also becomes more conspicuous. Moreover, these novels allude to a couple of Moa Martinson's earlier works, with characters from Women and Apple Trees and Queen Greygolden reappearing and some of their stories being retold prior to developing in new directions. In other words, the Brooksian pattern of detour and deviance, within an ineluctable framework of beginning and end, is pronounced in these novels. The pattern is reinforced by the narrative technique which draws heavily on an omniscient narrator who is double-voiced, reaching, at one level, only the limited perspective of the characters but achieving, on other occasions, a bird's-eye view framing the characters in a cycle of inevitability. Klas Johan Vandel, farmer at Vandelhog in the second half of the nineteenth century, has an ambition to write a family history, to write 'about the warriors in the family, about great men, fools and drunkards, idlers and dreamers, but he could not perceive what would be the purpose of doing this'.42 Moa Martinson's narrative is in no way confined to the men of Vandelhog; as I have indicated already, these novels span the entire community. And they do so in an effort to highlight a limitless interdependence, a democracy of everyday life that runs counter to the social divisions. The chronological range of these novels highlights a changing society, the power of the big estates gradually declining, the farms

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adapting to the demands of the growing towns, and the systems of assistance and support of the agricultural community slowly being replaced by a more modern welfare structure. Again, Moa Martinson's central preoccupations can be seen as the products of these upheavals: her characters tend to have an individualism inspired by twentieth-century notions, including political consciousness and literary modernism, but at the same time they are the products of an age-old dependence on the soil, a dependence which tended to reduce humankind to a pre-individual level. And here, as in an earlier work such as Women and Apple Trees, the female characters are to be found on the very borderline. In The Road beneath the Stars and Orange Lilies, two female characters, both of whom become connected with Vandelhog, assume particular prominence. Ulla and Gertrud each have distinctive projects, reflecting the idealism that sets up such a fundamental tension in Moa Martinson's plots. Ulla, who has previously appeared in Queen Greygolden, arrives at Vandelhog as a maid intent on marrying the farmer, unaware of the fact that his maids invariably become his mistresses and no more. A realist, Ulla is decisive and progressive; and her efforts to extend her influence at Vandelhog initially seem quite successful. Gertrud, one of the daughters of Mother Sofi who committed suicide in Women and Apple Trees, represents a very different ideal. She embodies the myth and fairytale which are recurring elements in Moa Martinson's texts. Her empathy with her fellow human beings, be they a sick drummer discharged from the army, unmarried mothers working in a factory, or the half-blind old woman looking after the children of these mothers, give her the proportions of a worldly saint while simultaneously justifying the description of her as 'a human being for the future'.43 Despite their projects, however, both women find themselves the victims of the inevitability which Moa Martinson's texts tend to label 'fate'. Ulla, who is much younger than Vandel, is eventually married to him, only to discover that he prefers other women. When Vandel dies, Ulla marries a descendant of the gipsies at Riasen, thus confirming not only the special bond between Vandelhog and this poor outlying farm but also the effective superiority of the people at Riasen. The pattern has' been anticipated by the relationship between Gertrud and Ville at

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Riasen, with Ville fathering her child but dying in an accident a few years later. While Ulla continues to struggle with the inevitability of human existence, Gertrud, in an echo of her mother's act, takes her life. Compared to other major texts about Swedish farming communities, such as Selma Lagerlof s Jerusalem (1901-02) and Elin Wagner's Asa-Hanna (1918), Moa Martinson's The Road beneath the Stars and Orange Lilies lack a central ethical project. The focus of the narrative is the human condition in a changing society, with the cyclical demands of the soil fusing with the claims of sexual desire to form an irrepressible counterpoint to more idealist ambitions. These overall patterns are invariably beyond the grasp of the individual characters, as illustrated by the encounter between Vandel and one of his former mistresses, the landlady at the inn: 'Life had frolicked about with them in its incomprehensible dance. Now they were standing here, she no longer young, Vandel an old man, and they understood nothing at all'.44 The text, crucially, offers a perspective on the human condition. With remarkable insight and an almost stubborn attention to detail, Moa Martinson's novels capture an era of decisive transition in the development of modern Swedish society. The broad, all-encompassing narratives are her hallmark, with a more conventional psychological novel such as the series about Betty, starting with Den osynlige alskaren (The Invisible Lover, 1943) and ending with Hemligheten (The Secret, 1959), striking the reader as rather more subdued and almost monotonous as a result of its narrow focus. Betty, however, is another of Moa Martinson's prominent and capable female characters; and in the last analysis, this narrative celebration of woman, especially the anonymous woman belonging to the rural proletariat and/or the urban working class, stands out as Moa Martinson's greatest contribution to Swedish literature.

8

Birgitta Trotzig (born 1929) UNIQUENESS AND DIFFERENCE

Birgitta Trotzig established herself as one of the major writers of her generation by the early 1960s. Author of novels as well as poetic prose, essays and articles, and elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1993, she has often had her oeuvre described as unique.1 In 1987 she published, as part of a collaborative study of contemporary Sweden, a chapter entitled 'Det sekulariserade Sverige: Det sakralas hemligheter' ('Secularised Sweden: The Secrets of the Sacred'), which offers illuminating insights into her specialness in the Swedish context. In her chapter, she is highly critical of what she calls the Swedish 'utopia about Unity whose negative side is a kind of devastating urge towards repression and castration'.2 Having traced the historical roots and political implications of the Swedish preoccupation with unity, Birgitta Trotzig asserts that there are few countries 'where the ideal of conformity to the community, to the norms of the community, those norms which define what is normally acceptable — the Utopia of unity and uniformity in other words — have penetrated so far into the individual, creating such a rigid and narrow concept of normality'.3 The result, she stresses, is a climate that is particularly unfavourable to the creation of art; and she singles out the fiddler of the Swedish folktales, in compact with the Devil, as the archetypal symbol of the conflict between the demands of the community and the cravings of the individual.4 In many respects, Birgitta Trotzig's life reads like a sustained protest against Swedish conformity. She was born Birgitta Kjellen in 1929 in Gothenburg, a city which she has depicted as bustling with activity, outward-looking and open to change: 'from Gothenburg the liners for America departed'.5 Although almost contemporary with the coming to power of the Social Democrats and the foundation of the Swedish 'home of the people', her preference

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for perceiving her generation in an existential context has similarly amounted to the transcending of national boundaries. She has characterised her era as 'that of the unprecedented destruction of human beings',6 a perspective which has far-reaching consequences for the poet: The fact that you happen to have been born in a kind of St. Petersburg before the flood does not affect the objective theme of the great struggle of the world, nor does the fact that you yourself are battling with individual problems of expression and local, provincial instances of blindness impinge on the truth that the motor of all poetry, now that the twentieth century is drawing to a close, is the same across the borders: the struggle of human life against the powers of death, in whatever form they appear.7 When Birgitta Trotzig moved with her family to Kristianstad, on the east coast of the province of Skane in the far south of the country, she experienced the change as a form of exile; but in due course the area was to provide the setting for several of her novels. Her early reading included writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Artur Lundkvist (1906-1991), with the latter, whom she met when she was in her teens, becoming a kind of mentor.8 Among other writers who have influenced her she has mentioned Kafka, Hesse, Kierkegaard, Nerval, Baudelaire, Novalis, Holderlin, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist and Dostoevsky,9 along with Theresa of Avila, Juan de la Cruz and Simone Weil.10 Birgitta Trotzig returned to Gothenburg in 1949 to study at the university but left to write her first novel. She also established herself as a literary critic. Having married the painter Ulf Trotzig she left Sweden in 1954, spending a year in Italy and subsequently settling in France. She has described France as a formative experience, referring especially to the impact of the Algerian War, the role of the ideological range and contrasts represented by the French press,11 and last but not least, her discovery of the crowds, the tightly packed conglomerate of peoples and races in the world city, the drifting, maltreated human beings \vho were pushed and forced through the great machine of exploitation. It was there, in the seething human darkness, that

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I realised that the dimensions and problems of the human being are huge. And from a religious point of view I felt that it was here, among the exploited masses, that the church of He Who Was Crucified really was.12 When she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1955, Birgitta Trotzig's political radicalism was an important factor. Referring to the Roman Catholic Church, she has subsequently emphasised her continuing dependence on 'this strange collective organism which produces not only Great Inquisitors but also Brazilian, Chilean, Spanish and Basque successors to the Prisoner of the Great Inquisitor'.13 Among her fellow Swedes, however, she found that 'for a long time the combination of Catholicism and some kind of left-wing commitment left people utterly baffled'.14 In 1969 Birgitta Trotzig returned to Sweden with her husband and three children; their fourth child was born after their return. Not unexpectedly, she found adapting to life in Sweden difficult; but, as she has explained, she was the one who had insisted on coming back. As a writer, she felt the need for her roots: 'when all is said and done, it is this very language and this very reality connected with this language that are my starting points'.15 It has always been my conviction, Birgitta Trotzig has declared, that poetry, i.e. the poetic experience of life with all its manifestations in the form of words, images, sounds and movements, and religion, without any clear boundary towards myth, fairytale and magic, provide the most far-reaching and comprehensive means for our understanding of reality.16 To Birgitta Trotzig, religion and art are the main antitheses to the twentieth-century 'super-ego society' of which Sweden stands out as such a striking example. Perceiving religion as the centre of resistance against the inhumanity of the contemporary world, Birgitta Trotzig, born into the Swedish state church, is convinced that the separation of the state and the church is crucial in order to allow the members of a society to recognise that they consist of two beings, one belonging to the secular organisation and the other

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to the spiritual one. This equals, in my opinion, a dialectic relationship within the human being too. And it is all important, for the individual as well as for society, that this remains dialectic: a functioning relationship of tensions.17 Birgitta Trotzig's conversion to Roman Catholicism was partly dictated by her interest in the history of religion. She wanted a form of Christianity that was as pristine as possible, one in which - unlike the Swedish Lutheran Church — the ritual was primary and the sermon and interpretation were secondary. Art, she has pointed out, used to have a religious function with clear ritual implications.18 If we view religion as the collective antithesis to the super-ego society, art can be read as the individual act of protest. Birgitta Trotzig interprets artistic images as 'anti-images' with, for example, the medieval iconography of the tortured body of Christ made divine amounting to a calling into question of a system of the world where some have the power to torture and murder the children of others, a calling into question in which the artist has forced the kneeling donors and the gilded bishops to accompany him all the way to the place of execution.19 The freedom of art and its 'uselessness', at the immediate level, are of paramount importance to Birgitta Trotzig. In the 1960s, with Sweden at the beginning of a period ofpoliticisation of the arts, she characteristically toyed with the idea of writing a 'manual on the art of resisting the simplifications of a party ideology'.20 She insists that her poetic texts have no background in conscious ideas or logic; on the contrary, she regards it as crucial to keep her rational thought processes at bay and focus on tracing images which she likens to dreams.21 Exploring these images means following 'a road inwards', the act of writing 'acknowledging and showing aspects of the human being which are strongly censored or oppressed or not acknowledged at all, but which do exist'.22 Challenging the brazen rationalism of contemporary society, Birgitta Trotzig insists that 'To this day, the real, concrete life of humankind takes place at a level that only myth can truly embrace'.23 To Birgitta Trotzig, an avowed modernist, writing is both about doing justice to her inner

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24

contradictions, and about involving her readers in an aspect of reality that is seen and not thought: 'My texts are not statements about life. My texts are fragments of life'.25 EARLY NOVELS

Her first book, Ur de dlskandes liv (From the Lives of Loving Women, 1951), has been described by the author as symptomatic of the overall direction of her writing: it was a book in which I had managed to eliminate all but the pure imagery. A book which was intended to be purely "aesthetic" [. . .] because of my belief that the existence of the aesthetic object as such has a moral significance.26 The images in this book of poetic prose, about three young women in the process of discovering their sexuality, are characterised by a remarkable subtlety and empathy. The critic Eva Adolfsson has highlighted the centrality of the text's conflict between the development of female sexuality, in a male-dominated world, and the emergence of a feminine language and identity;27 and this conflict between convention and tradition on the one hand and creativity and renewal on the other points forward to Birgitta Trotzig's subsequent works. Particularly interesting is the predominance of female character's in this first book, defining a female creative potential which I see as central to her oeuvre but which has not previously received the attention it deserves. Birgitta Trotzig's breakthrough came in 1957 with the novel De utsatta (The Exposed), subtitled En legend (A Legend). The setting is the north-east of Skane in the second half of the seventeenth century, a period when Sweden and Denmark were at war over the province; but as Birgitta Trotzig has emphasised, external reality in her texts invariably refers to 'an inner landscape'.28 An early section of the novel consists of a story of the Creation, drawing on the opening chapters of Genesis as its intertext. But as Ulf Olsson, author of a doctoral thesis on The Exposed has pointed out, this account of the Creation differs markedly from the biblical version. Where the Bible establishes a clear causal relationship between God and His world, underlining its definitive qualities by means of the past tense, the relationship between God and the world in Birgitta Trotzig's novel is rather more ambiguous, with

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the use of the present tense indicating a continuing, open-ended process.29 Similarly in The Exposed the Fall, depicted as the human being turning his or her face away from God and thus destroying the primeval harmony, is a continuing process which sets culture, i.e. the history of humankind, against nature, i.e. that which is different.30 God's absence and the distance to the Other breed a desire that underlies all of Birgitta Trotzig's work. As Eva Adolfsson has emphasised, this fundamental lack, the awareness that the self depends on sources beyond itself, emerges as a prerequisite of creativity: 'From the acceptance of this dependence the urge to create is born, from this hunger language is born'.31 Much of The Exposed consists of short paragraphs, sometimes no longer than a single sentence; and the predominance of initial coordinating conjunctions such as 'and' and 'but' makes for a non-causal and potentially ambivalent relationship between the segments of the narrative. What emerges is a dialectic, open-ended text, the effect enhanced by the powerful imagery. In Birgitta Trotzig's novel images of nature and images of culture are contrasted as if in persistent counterpoint, highlighting a tension that is at the very root of the work. Here nature, at the immediate level, is the exposed coastland around the Skane town of Christianstad, its meagre, sandy soil supporting small farming communities. The farmer's relationship with his animals points towards a prelapsarian harmony: And in the hand of the farmer was a mildness which he did not show to anyone but the animals: alone with sheep and horses and foals he called them and they came up to him and he stroked them.32 Nature reaches all the way up to the walls of the town of Christianstad in the form of a marshland of reeds, willows and patches of open water harbouring a rich variety of animals and birds. The smell of vegetation and the sound of wildlife penetrate the town, and in late spring and early summer the song of the nightingale brings nature into its very midst. The fortified town represents the opposite of the freedom and creative potential of nature. The burghers emerge as materialists and early capitalists, with the shrewd businessman S0ved Fischer, who doubles as the town apothecary, skilfully changing sides as

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Christianstad finds itself a pawn in the war between the Danes and the Swedes. The war is depicted as a consequence of culture and is seen almost wholly from the perspective of the inhabitants of the town, culminating in a ransacking and an almost year-long siege which bring home the meaningless destruction, the brutalisation and suffering caused by war. These themes are recurring ones in Birgitta Trotzig's texts, placing her in the strong Swedish tradition of women pacifist writers. In The Exposed, culture is determined by the patriarchal Logos, epitomised by the teachings of the Lutheran church and its ministers. A minister is at the centre of this text: widowed and approaching the end of his career, Isak Graa finds himself 'alone; and quite satisfied' as he scrutinises the 'treasure' he has assembled and which consists, first and foremost, of 'the word of the law preached, the service of the word conducted on holidays and weekdays, exact gestures, exact words'.33 With his son studying for the ministry and his daughter married off to S0ved Fischer in Christianstad, he can wrap himself in his own righteousness. But he is to suffer a fate worse than that of the eponymous minister in Selma Lagerlofs Gosta Berling's Saga: not only is he defrocked and reduced to beggary, but on the initiative of his son-in-law, he is confined to the town madhouse. Central to Birgitta Trotzig's work, to quote Eva Adolfison, is 'the creation of an implied author who assumes the position of those who are most lowly';24 and among the diary fragments in Birgitta Trotzig's Ett landskap (A Landscape, 1959) we find lines such as 'Artistic work: letters, attempts at communication, proximity. Message. Means of establishing a relationship with something other than oneself. Means of losing oneself ,35 In The Exposed the public humiliation of Isak Graa is traced in relentless detail, one parallel, as Ulf Olsson has pointed out, being the capture and treatment of Christ prior to the crucifixion.36 But the images of the minister reduced to wearing the rags of deceased inmates of the poorhouse, walking barefoot and hungry in the snow, lining up with his bowl with the other beggars outside the church where he used to preach on a Sunday - emerge in counterpoint to the text's highly charged images of women and children. Prior to his removal from office, which has been precipitated by political changes, the minister's daughter has travelled from Christianstad in an attempt to warn

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him. She has brought her youngest, sickly child on the long and cold journey, but her father's lack of empathy for mother and child leave them facing each other in helpless silence. A parallel juxtaposition, at the textual level, occurs when the beggar Isak Graa attempts to rescue a child from a pack of wolves, the event set against an account of the pregnancy of his daughter-in-law. Having discovered a sick and starving child in the snow, the defrocked minister tries to save both of them from the wolves by clambering up an oak tree, only to lose his grip on the child and have to listen to the sounds of the wolves tearing it apart.37 This is a Christoferos who fails in his mission;38 but the man in the tree who loses the child and saves himself can also be read as an inverted, or indeed perverted, version of the crucified Christ. The antithesis is the detailed description of the development of a human foetus, with the emphasis on the vegetative aspects of the process and on the total and harmonious symbiosis of mother and foetus, on life's interdependence on life: But in his hidden body her weak, bitter blood is turned into his life; her body belongs to his life. He is a stranger: the face which is being formed by her blood, the voice with which he will call her she does not know. But her blood belongs to him: his limbs, warmed by her blood, belong to him, their breathing, their movements, their thoughts belong to his life in her - to him who shall be born she belongs; his life is the life of her body, and from her body he shall be born into the light of day.39 Depictions of gestation and childbirth are conspicuous in Birgitta Trotzig's work, and towards the end of The Exposed the birth of the child whose development has been traced in the quotation above becomes a major focus of release and renewal. The textual setting is the humiliation of Isak Graa, incarcerated in a madhouse depicted as hell on earth, with screaming inmates tied up and left to lie in the stinking, rat-infested straw. The mortification of the minister reduces him to 'an old, abandoned child',40 thus preparing him for a relationship with God founded on fundamental need. The detailed birth scene, describing the mother's initial pains, her long hours spent walking up and down the room to speed up the

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delivery, and the final phase of tearing pain, fear and blood, convey the process of birth as at once overwhelmingly physical and forever miraculous, with the newborn child assuming the dimensions of a Christ figure. It is this child that Jakobine eventually brings to Isak Graa in the madhouse, the mother and child confronting the father, and the old man's eyes at last being opened to the wonderful significance of his daughter and the infant boy in a scene that fuses the frustrated desire propelling this text into a moment of peace, harmony and love. In this text where the creation continues via dialectic relationships, the resurrection thus emerges as horizontal, as an inter-personal process located here on earth.41 LATER WORKS

In Birgitta Trotzig's opinion, there is no distinct chronology, no development in her oeuvre: 'I could really have written my first book today', she said in an interview in 1993, explaining that 'What I have written is a coherent world that I have, and my books represent differing methods of getting into it'.42 But even if the central preoccupations and the main themes of her texts have remained consistent, there have been subtle shifts of emphasis. While the characters in The Exposed emerge chiefly as exempla, starkly delineated against the flat, exposed landscape, some of the characters in En bemttelse fran kusten (A Tale from the Coast, 1961), which does have the subtitle Roman ('Novel'), highlight a psychological complexity that has been developed still further in her subsequent works. Initially, the parallels between A Tale from the Coast and The Exposed are more conspicuous than any differences. The predominant setting is the same part of Sweden, albeit a couple of centuries earlier. Again, a young woman is married off to an older man absorbed by his business ambitions; a son abandons his father to suffering and agony; and warfare with its accompanying atrocities is depicted as the nadir of a culture determined by the patriarchal Logos. But here the fundamental conflict is heightened by being transposed inside the characters. Lavst Peder, business man and subsequently Mayor of the port of Ahus, beats and rapes his young wife only to accuse her of carrying a child fathered by someone else. But we are offered an explanation for his behaviour in the public humiliation of his mother, on

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whom he used to be highly dependent, when he was nine years old: Afterwards, then, he did not see his mother, it was not his fault, the part of him which saw her and perceived her had gone inside itself and slammed the door shut; sevenfold door, sevenfold lock, no intention to open could be noticed, the prisoner inside was not even banging, he seemed to feel perfectly at home or the prison was so secure that nothing could be heard outside. And everything becomes a habit, a painless habit in the end. For entirely without pain, entirely without resistance and the quiverings of life it did not happen.43 The brutal destruction of the primeval harmony has turned Lavst Peder into a hard and merciless man, but one who, at least at times, is aware of and craves for something different. As if in a musical composition, the conflict between nature and culture, between the creative potential stemming from woman and the effects of patriarchal law, is repeated and heightened in another male character, the brother of Lavst Peder's young wife. Left motherless at an early age, Hiram has developed a close relationship with his younger sister Apelone, the descriptions of their childhood days spent on the blossoming moors of western Jutland recalling Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1787). To Hiram, his sister is synonymous with freedom and the growth of spring,44 but gradually he has to acknowledge that his love of her also contains a sexual dimension. The result is a paralysing personal split, with the brother unable either to confront his father over the decision to marry Apelone to Lavst Peder or to comfort his sister. The fact that Hiram joins the Black Friars and subsequently becomes a prior in the town where his married sister is living can only sharpen this version of the conflict between nature and culture. In A Tale from the Coast the mother figure whose fate, symbolically as well as immediately, impinges on those of the other central characters, is one of the lowliest and most despised inhabitants of Ahus. The poor hunchback Merete becomes the focal point of the text's sequence of images of the female body, miraculously giving birth - with the image of the Holy Mother and Child as a foil - but, more conspicuously, exploited, violated, persecuted as a scapegoat and stoned to death. Merete can be seen as personifying the Other

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which a number of the characters in the text are struggling so hard to contain and deny. Merete's birth on a Good Friday focuses the mythical implications of a suffering that is to determine her life. She develops her hunchback after an accident in early childhood, the physical pain soon turning into the psychological pain of being an outcast, the butt of scorn and snowballs from the children and contemptuous silence and fear from the adults. The treatment she experiences creates a parallel, provocatively transcending the social boundaries, with the fate of Apelone, the Mayor's wife, who is regularly beaten and violated. Yet despite her sufferings, Merete preserves her capacity for compassion and love. It is no accident that her name is connected with that of the Mother of God; similarly, the sea with which she is symbolically linked is not the sea carrying goods and wealth for Lavst Peder but the all-embracing depths which are the source of creation: All the way into the midst of the town, deep into its dark core, in the darkness and silence sounds are to be heard, a motherly smell of salt is to be perceived. It is the sea. The voice of the sea is distant and enormous, its murmur penetrates the darkness. The sea is huge and salt. The freshwater streams from the heights issue into it, with salmon and drifting reeds far out at sea. It receives into it all streams and rivers and their life. It has great dark salty waves, they crest and disappear alone far out at sea where there is nothing but sea and waves, a cold dark salt depth.45 Paradoxically, the despised hunchback is the character embodying these primeval powers of renewal. She is the one who takes mercy on the soldier from Livonia, a man whose life has been torn apart by the experience of war, his participation in a gang-rape that has resulted in the death of a young Polish girl having left him psychologically crippled. Merete perceives that 'this human being could only be saved by a love unto death';46 and the images of their relationship radiate a sense of promise and optimism rare in this dark tale. Merete, too, is the character giving birth towards the end of the novel in a scene which, just as in The Exposed, reaffirms the centrality of female creativity and the decisive role

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of the mother-child relationship. At the same time, however, the text insists on returning to its relentless themes: the child has been fathered by Lavst Peder, or by any of the men who joined him in gang-raping Merete nine months previously; and when the child, still no more than a toddler, succumbs to an infectious fever and dies, Merete is made a scapegoat and stoned to death. Once more the separation of mother and child is. enacted, in this case with death as the agent, encouraging the community to give vent to its own fundamental and collective sense of loss. At a time when atheism was one of the foremost topics,in the public debate in Sweden and many Swedish authors were on the verge of an era of explicitly political and often documentary writing, Birgitta Trotzig, in a novel fusing psychoanalysis and myth, places a female Christ figure at the centre of her narrative. Emphatically different in the contemporary Swedish context, her work can be seen to have affinities with the late poetry of Gunnar Ekelof, with the texts of both writers having a common ground in the work of Edith Sodergran (see Chapter 5). In an article celebrating the revolutionary power of Edith Sodergran's poetry, Birgitta Trotzig has highlighted the role of her predecessor's femininity, taking issue with the male critics who have discerned a 'constitutional coldness' in the work of the Finland-Swedish poet. Birgitta Trotzig depicts the implications of Edith Sodergran's femininity in terms that can be seen as having a direct bearing on her own texts, asserting that for her fellow writer the central problem concerns 'incarceration and freedom: a narrow, reductive, castrating experience of life as opposed to one that is more open, more complete'.47 Significantly, Birgitta Trotzig also emphasises that Edith Sodergran, along with her female contemporaries, in actual fact gives voice to much more than a limited feminine point of view: this is about the struggle for life of the whole new human being. The human being who wants to be acknowledged as such, the human being who refuses to be exploited, whether in terms of ability to work or in terms of gender.48 Birgitta Trotzig's texts express a similarly radical feminine awareness, as evidenced by their preoccupation not only with the poor and the despised but, strikingly, with male characters. The strategy of localising the conflict between culture and nature within male

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characters recurs in a couple of the novellas in Levande och doda (The Living and the Dead, 1964), and is developed more fully in Birgitta Trotzig's next novel, Sveket (The Deceit, 1966). It is set in the twentieth century, and its central character is Tobit, the owner of a small farm. He helps to pinpoint a symbolism which has become central to Birgitta Trotzig's novels from The Deceit onwards, a symbolism whose core is mud, with associations with the entire spectrum from stinking filth to blossoming marshlands, from decomposition to fertility. The critic Gunilla Bergsten has characterised it as 'the realm of creative formlessness in which death is the prerequisite of life'.49 This symbolism, in other words, takes us back to the very beginning, to a phase where no boundaries have yet been drawn, where the patriarchal Logos has not yet made its impact. Tobit encounters all of this in his relationship with a young woman from the decayed building housing the poorest members of the community, a young woman who 'was nothing but someone who gave the impression of being no one at all, fear made visible, something pale, askew, quickly stepping aside, tied up around its perception of nothing and worthlessness'.50 With her Tobit, another of Birgitta Trotzig's many characters to have grown up without motherly love, experiences a sense of paradisical harmony in which 'everything was like a smile beyond reason, words, the future: the smile of a lunatic, a dream, a tearing sweetness',51 but in the full knowledge that this relationship in no way matches the standards of his parents and the conventional respectability expected from him. The child resulting from this relationship leaves Tobit, once the little girl's mother has died, with a living reminder of a dimension of existence with which he is unable to come to terms. In an echo of Selma Lagerlof s The Emperor of Portugallia he is the father who adores his daughter, even having a beautiful red dress made for her,52 but at the same time he regards it as his duty to control those aspects of Tora-Greta which recall her mother: a boundless fluidity, a vagueness pointing beyond the established order. When he eventually locks her inside his earth-covered cellar he is suppressing, inexorably, part of himself. Birgitta Trotzig's text gives these characters, male and female, the attention and in several cases also the identity which their fellow human beings seem to deny them. Its sequence of strong

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images emanates from an empathy that emerges as an overwhelming illustration of the narrative's preoccupation with the role of unconditional love. The novel Sjukdomen (The Disease), which Birgitta Trotzig published in 1972, takes the theme of male disintegration to new extremes while at the same time being a more emphatically poetic and boldly unified work of art than any of her previous texts of this length. Here the visual impact of the imagery acquires a hallucinatory quality. The narrative, again set in the twentieth century, opens with a section that anticipates and summarises the plot and the central themes, the strategy guiding the reader beyond the contents towards the process of the narrative, thus also highlighting the musical effect of this complex text with its poignant interlinking of themes and images. Here the central character's search for the motherly love that could have provided the basis for his sense of identity assumes mythical proportions, as the son's quest determines his increasingly fragmented existence and his tragic fate. With what looks like a reassuring touch of officialdom, son and father are regularly referred to with their surnames first: they are Strom, Elje Jesaja, and Strom, Albin, just as in the records of the authorities. Yet their identities begin to dissolve and merge even in the opening section. Strom, Elje, who has once had a mother — 'This was the only thing he knew that distinguished him from everybody else so that he could touch it and say: this is where I begin, this is where the others end'53 — turns out to have unmistakeable parallels with Strom, Albin, who has also found himself in pursuit of a woman, and whose capture and violation of this woman, Elje's mother, similarly anticipate his son's treatment of the woman who eventually befriends him. It is no accident that both women are foreigners, lacking identities in the most immediate sense as well as pronouncable names. They embody a vagueness, an affinity with the unknown and thus with potential dissolution which father and son perceive as a threat. The mud imagery is no less prominent in The Disease than in the previous novel and carries the same, dual significance, with the clay that produces row upon row of sugarbeet also being seen as a substance with the power of trapping, sucking down and absorbing those who work in it. The language of this novel embodies the split experienced by a

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central character who is becoming increasingly psychotic. Acutely aware of the rigid control assumed by his father in an attempt to keep dissolution and decay at bay, Elje also has a secret existence, its most palpable manifestation being the hollow in the beech wood in which he can immerse himself in rotting leaves and soil. From here a perspective opens up towards the mother for whom he is searching,54 and here he can hear the sound of the earth crying.55 His father's teachings that women in general and Elje's mother in particular represent uncleanliness are paralleled by a mounting fragmentation of Elje's world, formulated by a language that literally makes the impressions fall apart on the page. Fuelled by rejection and fear, the father-son constellation makes for the emotional crippling of the older man and the younger one's fullblown schizophrenia. When woman is eventually brought into focus in this text, her Otherness seems only to be heightened. 'She came from a plain', we read at the beginning of a page nearly two-thirds of the way through the novel.56 The plain turns out to be in Poland, the native country of Elje's mother and thus a marker of purely geographical difference, but the anonymity of the 'She' also invites us to elide her with all the other vague and faceless women in this text. The figure of the girl from the plain assumes the dimensions of a metaphor of woman, turning the Kristevan abject into a subject,57 and provocatively acquiring the proportions of the Great Mother. She tends pigs, a task to which she has been set at the age of five; living with the animals, she becomes 'refuse that was alive'58 and is unable to develop a language. She is sexually exploited. She nourishes dreams of being of royal extraction and owns a picture of the Black Madonna, 'she who is darkened by absence, she who has been burnt, extinguished, she who is radiant in black ashes'.59 When she becomes pregnant and is driven away she walks to Czestochowa where she gives birth in the open. The child, a boy, is stillborn, his face black. Some years later, as SS soldiers are exterminating the population of a Polish town and herding the patients of a mental hospital out into a swamp, the patients are headed by the woman who once tended pigs, now known as 'The Queen of Poland', another name for the Black Madonna. Birgitta Trotzig's expansion of the narrative into a psychoanalytical interpretation, with mythical overtones of Nazism,

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represents a bold move. The battle against uncleanliness, originating in the scenes in which Strom, Albin has been reading to his son the apocalyptic texts of Judge Rutherford, grows into the Nazi campaign to annihilate all that which is labelled unclean in the name of an extreme version of the super-ego society: 'chop off and rape! shouted the emperor, chop off and rape into each and every fertile corner!'.60 When Elje finally encounters 'The Queen of Poland' in the guise of a mental hospital auxiliary and has intercourse with her, he is unable to determine whether he is 'the emperor defiling himself or the infant seeking nourishment';61 and lying on the ground with her in the midst of the lush summer greenery, he strangles her. 'Here lies the queen of the earth. She is the one she is. Her darkened face cannot be separated from that of the earth'.62 Rarely has Birgitta Trotzig created a more powerful 'anti-image', calling into question some of the fundamental tenets of twentieth-century civilisation. Yet Swedish critics of the highly politicised 1970s did not hesitate to castigate Birgitta Trotzig: commenting on The Deceit and The Disease in particular Kjerstin Noren, writing from a Marxist perspective, asserted that 'The split between the political and the artistic which she [Birgitta Trotzig] represents places her inexorably in an isolated position in relation to her readers'.63 At a time when the call was for an explicit political commitment, often formulated in documentary terms, Birgitta Trotzig pursued her preoccupations in a book of prose poetry, Ordgrdnser (Verbal Boundaries, 1968), and a volume of short stories, I kejsarens tid (In the Era of the Emperor, 1975). Her 1985 novel, Dykungens dotter (The Marsh King's Daughter), her latest to date and one of her most important, can indeed be seen to contain the subject matter of a work of social criticism.64 The setting is twentieth-century Sweden, including the years of high unemployment in the early 1930s. One of the central characters is a girl who becomes pregnant by a man who subsequently ends up in prison; and the text traces her struggle as a single parent and mill-worker. Her daughter, however, rejects the boundaries of social respectability and her. daughter's son ends up as an outcast and criminal who dies after having been shot by the police. Yet this, as the poet and critic Karl Vennberg has pointed out, is not a novel of social indignation but a novel of identification,

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the key to the exceptional empathy developed with the characters being Birgitta Trotzig's language. Here she has created what Karl Vennberg terms 'the wordless dialect of pain',65 the language making us participate, on equal terms, in that which the jargon of officialese automatically distances and covers up. From this 'wordless dialect' the author's poetic language with its archetypal imagery radiates. The contrasting language of laws and regulations, occasionally quoted, comes as a palpable shock. The novel draws on the framework of a fairytale. It takes its tide from a well-known tale by the nineteenth-century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. His 'Dynd-Kongens Datter' ('The Marsh King's Daughter') tells of an Egyptian princess who has a child by the Mud or Marsh King of a Danish bog, their daughter being a beautiful but wild girl by day and an ugly but sorrowing toad by night. As Birgitta Trotzig has explained, she found herself haunted by 'this being of night and day, of destruction and resurrection, the fairytale version of the metamorphoses of the soul';66 and more assiduously than any of her earlier texts, The Marsh King's Daughter explores the border country between nature and culturej the sphere where the animal is still akin to the human being, for better or for worse. The text unveils an inescapable affinity between the two, an affinity marginalised and obliterated by the super-ego society to the extent that human beings are crippled and rendered sterile. Thus the daughter - characteristically, she is to remain anonymous until we reach the inscription on her tombstone — goes in search of her father in the marshy forest around the town where she lives, experiencing this land of water and vegetation as her home: as she lies between the roots of an alder, they reached out around her like two knobbly dark legs, thighbones, which disappeared down into the light-coloured, leaf-speckled ground as if they had belonged to a body on its way down into the ground to bury itself, there was no difference any more between her and the leafy warm earth, the branches wanting down into the earth, the roots wanting up into the sky.67 With the mother developing a cultural rigidity fuelled by fear both of the child welfare authorities and of her innermost self, the unconditional love demanded and deserved by the human being is

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illustrated by the affinity between the daughter and her baby son, an example of the semiotic relationship between mother and child: At once a living world appeared, someone searches, someone replies, someone wants to take and take, someone gives and gives, the world is search and answer, the world is call and answer, it was simply the world that came into being [. . . ] And every part of his body was a word to her, every part of her body called and whispered to him, when he slept it mumbled and whispered incessantly to her soul about him. Now everything was of a piece, she, the boy, the whole world were of the same blood and could not be separated.68 Forever miraculous in Birgitta Trotzig, the emergence of a human being is a delicate process, fraught with danger. With the daughter's struggle to keep her son and retain her freedom in the face of the decisions of the authorities assuming metaphorical dimensions, their eventual separation and her incarceration stand out as perverse violations of the mother—child dyad. And society's ruthlessness knows no end: having been made to undergo an abortion, the daughter is compulsorily sterilised, the operation cutting her off from the rest of the world. Now she was alone, quite separate. It cried and cried within her: Alone! Alone! All the time she was going round and round just looking for her son, this was how she would continue, it was unbearable to watch.69 The Marsh King's Daughter can be read as a powerful plea for the freedom of the individual and a calling into question of standards of 'normality' that threaten to become increasingly rigid and restrictive. Read in mythical terms, as referring to St Anne, Mary and the Son, this becomes a devastating critique of civilisation with the Mother of God forcibly separated from her Son, sterilised and left to take her life in sorrow, while her son - who is indeed born on Christmas Eve70 - turns into a social misfit and a criminal who is hunted down and shot by the police. In Hans Christian Andersen's tale, Christ becomes the saviour of the Marsh King's daughter; in Birgitta Trotzig's world, Christ is absent and humankind has been abandoned.

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Birgitta Trotzig's work can be read as 'repeated attempts to maintain [a] dialogue with suffering in the -world'.71 With this dialogue representing the fusion of her commitment to religion and art, her characterisation of language as she defines the situation of the author becomes particularly illuminating: being an author, according to Birgitta Trotzig, amounts to 'always being at the very beginnings of language and incessantly experiencing how threatened it is'.72 Strikingly illustrating Julia Kristeva's explorations of the links between poetic language and the semiotic, it is, I believe, this urgency of Birgitta Trotzig's unadorned rhythms with their affinity with archetypal symbols, fairytale and myth that more than anything else gives her writing its exceptional power and depth.

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PART III 1961-1995

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9 New Generations at the Forefront THE BREAK-UP OF CENTRALISM

In comparison with the period 1919-1961, the decades since the early 1960s stand out as volatile and uncertain, a period during which many seemingly fundamental aspects of Swedish politics and society have been called into question and subjected to change, at a pace that has only quickened over the last ten or fifteen years. While the 1960s and the early 70s was primarily a period of radical political commitment, reflected in a widening range of texts as well as in major confrontations in the labour market, the more recent decades have showed up some familiar facets of postmodernity, including new preferences for pluralism and alternative solutions. In part, these shifts have been reflected in the international questioning of life in Sweden which go back at least to the early 1960s, with the titles of some of the more significant studies speaking for themselves: A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Kathleen Nott's critical study, appeared in 1961; The New Totalitarian*, Roland Huntford's controversial book, was published ten years later; and 1980 saw the publication of Sweden: The Middle Way on Trial, Marquis Childs's reappraisal. In the context of the present study, the prominence in Sweden of gender issues throughout the decades since the early 1960s is of particular interest. The many-faceted criticism of the situation of women in Sweden, by women in Sweden as well as in the other Scandinavian countries and beyond, stands out as a major characteristic of the period since 1960. Women's vastly improved access to education and employment has given them both the insight and the tools to analyse their problems, with second-wave feminism helping to pinpoint and radicalise the issues. Since the 1970s, aspects of the situation of women, ranging from the impact of pornography and the experience of violence to women's representation in trade unions and the Swedish Parliament, have been

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discussed and analysed on an unprecedented scale. International comparisons and collaboration have contributed to modifying the view of the situation of women in Sweden, with the shortcomings of the central Social Democratic tenet of equality — whose Swedish equivalent, jdmlikhet, was replaced in the 1970s by the more attainable jamstalldhet, 'equal status' — coming in for particular criticism. However, before we begin to look at the literature of the eventful period since the early 1960s, and especially at texts written by women, the political and economic background needs to be outlined. In 1968, it had been decided to replace the bicameral Swedish Parliament, the riksdag, with a unicameral one, all the members of which would be elected simultaneously every three years. While the First Chamber of the earlier bicameral Parliament had been elected indirectly and thus had had a stabilising effect, the new system was designed to reflect the preferences of the electorate immediately, with the position of the government at stake in each election.1 Thus Olof Palme, who had succeeded Tage Erlander as Prime Minister in 1969, found himself having to form a minority government in September 1970, after the first elections to the unicameral Parliament; and the non-socialist victory expected in 1973 was only staved off by the death of the aged king shortly before the election, an event which persuaded the voters to return to traditional values and resulted in an even balance between the Social Democrats and the Communists on the one hand and the non-socialists on the other. This weakening of the power of the Social Democrats culminated in the non-socialist election victory in 1976. However, the non-socialist parties that formed a coalition government in the autumn of 1976 were facing major problems. Sweden was experiencing mounting economic difficulties: the oil crisis which had begun in 1973 was having a devastating impact, with the country heavily dependent on oil and, unlike Britain or Norway, unable to replace imports with indigenous resources. A number, of traditional Swedish industries like ship-building and steel-making were particularly badly hit; and the downturn in the Swedish economy in 1974-75 was the worst since the Second World War.2 The most extensive labour market conflict in

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Sweden this century followed in 1980, with one million employees either being locked out or on strike.3 Disagreement between the non-socialist parties, re-elected in 1979, on how to tackle this new crisis, prepared the way for a Social Democratic comeback in 1982. It is significant that the non-socialists, for all the economic problems that prevailed throughout their first period in office, made no attempt to reduce spending on the welfare state; on the contrary, they were anxious to emphasise that the extensive system constructed by the Social Democrats was no less important to them. Not until well into the 1980s did the parties, socialists as well as non-socialists, begin to accept that a continuing expansion of the welfare system and the public sector were incompatible with the efforts to balance the country's economy.4 This shift also reflected fundamental ideological changes. The growing interest, in the 1980s and 1990s, in phenomena such as decentralisation and alternative solutions can be linked in part to the mounting impact of the environmental movement, the national referendum on nuclear power in 1980 having heightened the public awareness of environmental issues, and the Green Party having fielded its first candidates in the 1982 General Election. However there is also, in a number of developments over the past few decades, an indication of a general drift to the right, familiar from several other European countries. It is no coincidence that the Swedish conservative party, the Moderates, did particularly well in the general elections throughout the 1980s, gaining in 1982 a bigger proportion of the votes than it had held since the 1930s, and surging forward again in the opinion polls of the mid-1990s. The relative successes of other right-wing parties such as the New Democrats and the Christian Democrats in the 1990s also need to be seen in this context. The murder of Olof Palme in a Stockholm street in February 1986 stands out as a shocking symbol of the end of an era. An idealism and comparative innocence that had sustained Sweden throughout much of this century disappeared for good; and the subsequent revelations about international arms sales undertaken against official policies added to an atmosphere of disillusion. Sweden, moreover, continued to be affected by serious economic problems, with unemployment remaining high, by Swedish

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standards, throughout the 1980s and continuing .to" rise in the 1990s. In a longer-term perspective, it is becoming obvious that Sweden had enjoyed exceptional conditions for growth during the decades immediately after the Second World War, with subsequent developments necessitating an adaptation to a very different situation.5 The 1991 General Election illustrated the drift to the right in Swedish politics, with the Social Democrats gaining their lowest proportion of the votes cast since the late 1920s, and the non-socialist coalition that was taking over being headed by a conservative Prime Minister, Sweden's first since 1930. This coalition was dependent on the support of the New Democratic Party, a focal point for much of the right-of-centre dissent and criticism that had gathered pace during the 1980s. The 1994 General Election was won by the Social Democrats, but their unassailable majorities would now seem to belong to the past. GENDER AMD SOCIETY

While in an international context second-wave feminism began to make its mark from the late 1960s onwards, the entire decade in Sweden was dominated by a debate on gender roles that to some extent anticipated second-wave feminism and foregrounded the contribution of women to the questioning of conditions in Swedish society. The debate "was initiated in 1961 by the columnist Eva Moberg (born 1932), who published an article entitled 'Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning' ('The Conditional Release of Woman'). Writing from a radical liberal perspective, she argued that Swedish women had not yet been granted full freedom as individuals: their choices of education and career patterns were severely restricted by the assumption that they would also carry the main responsibility for bringing up children. Eva Moberg was sharply critical of the line taken by Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein in Women's Two Roles: Home and Work (1956), which had appeared in Swedish translation in 1957: while these authors had advocated that women adapt their pattern of employment to their role as mothers, taking a break from paid work until the children reached school age, Eva Moberg argued that only a transformation of the role of men could improve the situation of women. In her view, the notion of the dual roles of women was obsolete: what mattered,

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she emphasised, was the role of women and men as human beings.6 Once men accepted the implications of this role and took on an equal share of childcare and housework, the career opportunities of women would improve as a matter of course. Eva Moberg's article to some extent anticipated a SwedishNorwegian volume by Edmund Dahlstrom and others, Kvinnors liv och arbete (1962; revised edition 1968), translated into English as The Changing Roles of Men and Women (1967). In a series of sociological studies, this book offered analyses of the development of gender role thinking in young children and of the impact of gender roles in adolescence and adulthood. Demolishing the myth that only the mother could provide adequate care for the young child, it highlighted the crucial role of the father, thus substantiating Eva Moberg's notion of the significance of the role of women and men as human beings. The preface to the revised edition implies that it was the publication of The Changing Roles of Men and Women that contributed to transforming 'women's issues' into 'gender role issues' in Sweden.7 It is true that the book was to have a decisive impact on policy making in this area for a long time to come, resulting in legislation that attracted considerable international attention. To some extent, the consequences of this debate are reflected in women's increased participation, especially from the 1970s onwards, in the labour market and in politics. While women had constituted only a quarter of the Swedish labour force in 1945 (the figure had in fact been higher fifteen years earlier), the proportion had reached 35 per cent in 1970, 43 per cent in 1980 and 47.7 per cent in 1989, dropping to 45 per cent in 1994.8 By 1990, 83 per cent of Swedish women between the ages of 15 and 64 were in the labour force. In an international context, this is a very high figure, the British equivalent (1988) being 64 per cent.9 Over the past few decades, women more than any other category have accounted for the expansion of the Swedish labour force, and a very large proportion of these women have been the mothers of young children. While 38 per cent of women in employment had children under the age of seven in 1963, the figure had climbed to 85.6 per cent in 1986.10 As the economist Christina Jonung has pointed out, the increase in the proportion of women in employment is one of the most fundamental changes

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to have occurred in the Swedish labour market this century, with a particularly noticeable shift, in the last few decades, towards a combination of employment and family commitments.11 How, then, does the position of women in employment compare with that of men? A team of Scandinavian scholars, Maud Eduards, Beatrice Halsaa and Hege Skjeie, all of them women, have concluded that the new employment opportunities for women in the Nordic countries (i.e. in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) are the products of labour market needs rather than of any official desire to promote equality.12 In Sweden the gap between women's and men's pay persists, with women in full-time work earning on average 80 per cent of average male earnings (full-time work) by the mid-1990s.13 The labour market continues to be sharply segregated in terms of gender, with 35 per cent of Swedish women in employment working in occupations where 9 out of 10 employees are women, 40 per cent of men working in occupations where 9 out of 10 employees are men, and only 5 per cent working in occupations where there is an equal distribution of women and men.14 As in so many other European countries, women have transferred their nurturing role on to the labour market, aided by the considerable expansion of the public sector in the 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s. In terms of hierarchies which are only too familiar - the higher and more influential the post, the less likely the post holder is to be a woman — this transfer of women's traditional role into the public sphere can in fact be viewed as a loss of influence, with women losing power to the men who tend to be the decision-makers.15 The gap between women's and men's pay is not only due to the fact that they are to be found in different occupations but also - and again predictably - to the fact that so many women work part-time. In 1989, 45 per cent of women in employment in Sweden were part-timers; the British figure was 44 per cent.16 And despite Swedish women's very high rate of participation in the labour force, they continue to carry the main responsibility for household work and childcare: a study in 1984-85 found that women spent on average 15 hours more per week on these tasks than did men.17 A comprehensive study of women in Nordic politics, undertaken by women scholars from the various countries and published

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in 1985, found that 'Women today are largely ineffectual in the actual decision-making process, although paradoxically this is nevertheless a sign of progress' — the reason being that women are still newcomers in the political arena.18 In Sweden, more women than men now vote in general elections,19 and by the mid-1980s women constituted between 30 and 40 per cent of the membership of the political parties.20 But here, as in other fields, an 'iron rule' applies: the more power, the fewer women.21 Women have certainly increased their parliamentary representation considerably during the 1970s and 1980s, from 14 per cent in 1970 to 26 per cent in 1980, 33 per cent in 1991 and 41 per cent in 1994,22 illustrating the finding that a system of proportional representation lessens women's difficulties in gaining access in comparison with a system such as the British one, which continues to ensure that the proportion of women in Parliament remains very low.23 In local politics, too, there has been a notable increase in the proportion of women. Only very slowly, however, have Swedish women been entrusted with governmental power: while both Denmark and Finland had women ministers in the 1920s, Sweden's first woman government minister, Karin Kock, a professor of economics, was not appointed until 1947; and only in 1954 did Sweden adopt the practice, by then established in Denmark and Norway, of including at least one woman minister in every government.24 Since the 1970s, the proportion of women ministers has increased, but the tendency to place women in charge of departments perceived to fall within their traditional sphere, notably health and education, was only broken with in 1991 when Sweden had its first woman Chancellor, Anne Wibble, as part of the new non-socialist Government. The Social Democratic Government formed after the 1994 General Election consists of equal numbers of women and men. In 1993 the country's first woman party leader, Gudrun Schyberg, was elected to head the Left Party (formerly the Left Party Communists); and in 1994, Maria Leissner became the leader of the Liberal Party (Folkpartiet). The patterns of women's employment and political representation traced above need to be seen in the context of the extensive efforts undertaken to bridge the gender gap during the 1970s and 1980s. In the wake of the debates on gender roles in the 1960s, the Social Democratic Government established an Equal Opportunities

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Advisory Committee (Jamstdlldhetsdelegationeri) in 1972. This body focused its attention on the labour market, initiating schemes to encourage women to enter traditionally male areas of employment; but the Social Democrats, along with the trade unions and the main employers' organisation, continued to insist that social and economic gender differences should be tackled by negotiation rather than by legislation. After the election of a non-socialist Government in 1976, a parliamentary committee began work on legislation against discrimination. The Equal Opportunities Act came into force in 1980, five years later than its British equivalent. It not only prohibits gender discrimination but also requires employers to take active measures to promote equality.25 Reforms in the area of family policy have similarly been designed to bridge the economic differences between women and men. The expansion of local authority childcare, begun in the 1960s, gathered pace throughout the following decades, and by the mid-1990s, around 60 per cent of Swedish under-sixes were looked after outside the home, the vast majority in local authority day-care centres.26 For school-age children there are after-school centres, attended by 49 per cent of the younger schoolchildren in 1991.27 A reform introduced in 1974 turned maternity leave into parental leave, giving fathers, in line with the demands of the 1960s debate, the opportunity to participate in looking after their children. After the birth or adoption of a child, Swedish parents have the right to a total of 15 months' leave, to be taken before the child is eight years old. From January 1995, each parent has an exclusive right to a period of 30 days, with the remaining 390 days divisible according to the preferences of the parents. The parents are compensated at 90 per cent of their gross income for the two 30-day periods, at 80 per cent for ten months, and at a fixed daily rate for the remaining three months. Parents also have the right to take time off to look after a sick child (currently 120 days per year per child) with compensation for the loss of earnings; and parents of children under eight can opt for a six-hour working day (although with a corresponding loss of pay).28 In all, these provisions are far more generous than in any other European country. Fathers, however, have been slow to take advantage of these reforms and were utilising only 10 per cent of parental insurance benefits in 1993;29 the introduction of two exclusive

1. Fredrika Bretner.

2. Fredrika Bremer. Statue by Sigrid Fridman, 1928.

3. Selma Lagerlof.

4. Elin Wagner.

5. Selma Lagerlof takes her entry in the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Dec. 1914.

6. Karin Boye.

7. Moa Martinson.

8. Birgitta Trotzig.

9. Sara Lidman.

10. Kerstin Ekman.

11. Sonja Akesson.

12. Agneta Pleijel.

13. Mare Kandre.

14. From Agneta Pleijel, Kollontaj, Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 1979.

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periods of 30 days represents an attempt to break this trend. The persistent differences between women's and men's pay go some way towards explaining the reluctance of fathers to make use of parental leave, as does the fact that three-quarters of working men are to be found in the private sector, which has shown itself to be considerably less keen on fathers taking parental leave than has the public one. With second-wave feminism to some extent having been anticipated by the Swedish gender role debate in the 1960s, it has been argued that the relative weakness of second-wave feminism, in comparison with the movements in Denmark and Norway, can be explained in terms of the impact of the government-led policy on equality.30 In a wider perspective, however, there is little doubt that second-wave feminism in Sweden has played a significant role in showing up the inadequacies of official policies and radicalising the public debate. The socialist feminist Grupp 8 (Group 8) had been formed by eight women in Stockholm in 1968, becoming a public organisation in 1970 and expanding throughout the country over the next decade. Kvinnoligan (The Women's League) in Lund emerged in 1970. Swedish second-wave feminism drew heavily on British feminism, but the decentralised structure of an organisation such as Group 8 and the significance of local consciousness-raising groups can also be seen as inspired by Elin Wagner's Alarm Clock (1941; see Chapter 4), which became an influential text and was published in a new edition in 1978. Kvinnobulletinen (The Women's Bulletin), the journal of Group 8, began to appear in 1970. Members of Group 8 mounted demonstrations for free abortions (the Swedish abortion law was liberalised in 1975, providing free abortions up to the twelfth week of pregnancy); and in 1974, Swedish feminists joined women in the other Scandinavian countries in a campaign against pornography. As in many other European countries, women's bookshops emerged and gradually also women's centres, the first Swedish one opening in Gothenburg in 1978. Throughout much of the 1970s, there was a wealth of exhibitions focusing on women's work and conditions, a major event being the Women's Culture Festival in Stockholm in 1977. Women's music groups flourished, contributing to a confirmation of the strength of a

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women's culture which also, as we shall see, was focused in novels and plays. By the 1980s, Swedish second-wave feminism in the familiar forms outlined above had lost much of its prominence. It was surviving, however, in academe; and this was where some of the most far-reaching criticisms of the consequences of the Swedish policy on equality originated.31 Women's perspectives and contributions, however, have hardly been welcomed by the Swedish academic establishment, and it is significant that one of the pioneers, Karin Westman Berg, who was in charge of the now legendary gender role seminars at Uppsala from 1967 to 1978, had to resort to having them arranged under the auspices of the Extra Mural Department. Conditions improved somewhat in the late 1970s, when government funding resulted in the setting-up of centres for woman-focused research at the Swedish universities. These centres, which arrange lectures and seminars as well as providing Women's Studies courses, now form a crucial network for scholars researching aspects of the situation of women. The Swedish commitment to equal status in terms of gender may have legitimised improvements in the situation of women, but in the words of the social scientist Maud Eduards, 'It seems evident that actual reforms and legislation in the name of equal status are of limited value for the empowerment of women'.32 Equal status policies have not changed the definitions of what constitutes useful, productive work, with the relative marginalisation of women's reproductive work continuing to ensure that Swedish society remains segregated by gender.33 There is a conflict between gender equality policies, based on the assumption that women and men are in employment, and social and family policies implying that women are responsible for caring for their children: 'Women are treated as workers and/or mothers, but not as a sex-group having specific interests because they are women. Women are not regarded as a politically legitimate collective in society'.34 Interestingly, however, new women's groupings are emerging, highlighting aspects of oppression previously made invisible by official attitudes and policies. Crisis centres for battered women were set up throughout the 1980s, with other forms of violence against women, from sexual harassment to rape, receiving critical attention as never before. A new joint association by women in

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trade unions has been formed, in the face of much protest from the male-dominated union hierarchy; and employees belonging to categories where women predominate, such as nurses and pre-school teachers, have resorted to protests and strikes on an unprecedented scale.35 The Women's Tribunal, arranged in Stockholm in March 1993 by the network calling itself Sto'dstrumpoma (The Support Stockings), focused criticism and discontent with a vigour not experienced since the 1970s. Arguably, Swedish women in the 1990s possess a more profound awareness of the impact and implications of the continuing predominance of male norms;36 and against the background of the political changes that have taken place in the country over the past few years, a further radicalisation and re-formation of the women's movement seems highly likely. LITERATURE: FROM POLITICAL COMMITMENT TO POSTMODERNISM

The emergence of a high-profile women's culture, most notably since the 1970s, is only one of the changes that have impinged on the production, consumption and status of Swedish culture over the past few decades. The major impact has been that of market forces. The selectivity necessitated by the various forms of state support that have been introduced has added still further to the remoteness of the control of culture. In 1970, free book pricing was introduced in Sweden, with the selection of books available becoming much less extensive. While this change resulted in an unprecedented boom for the book clubs, whose sales increased ten-fold during the 1970s and accounted for around a quarter of the market by 1990,37 new authors and the smaller bookshops have often found themselves facing mounting difficulties. With VAT being charged on books in Sweden, the average novel sells no more than around 1000 copies.38 Significantly, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of new Swedish literature published since the early 1970s, with works in translation, especially from English, claiming an ever larger share of the market. The 1970s also saw the emergence of extensive schemes of state support, for authors as well as for books. The active policies of the Swedish Writers' Union, formed in 1970 by the amalgamation of several smaller writers' and translators' associations, have considerably improved the financial position of its members. The

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Swedish Authors' Fund, established in 1954 and responsible for distributing the payment authors receive under public borrowing rights, administers grants and pensions too; and since 1976 a limited number of authors have also been the recipients of an annual 'guaranteed author's payment'. By 1988, around 200 Swedish authors received this payment.39 State support for new books published in Sweden has been available since 1975 and is administered by Statens kulturrdd (The Council for Cultural Affairs). This scheme has been of major importance to small publishers and to new Swedish works of prose and poetry, with around one third of texts of these types receiving support.40 Since 1976 Littemturfrdmjandet (The Society for the Promotion of Literature) has published cheap paperback reprints with state support in the series 'En bok for alia' (A Book for Everyone). In terms of the book market at least, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture that had become clearly marked in the inter-war years has thus persisted, with the bookshops now marketing both popular fiction, much of it translated, and highbrow works centring on original Swedish texts that depend on state support.41 As for Swedish authors, it has been argued that their growing dependence on state grants and other similar forms of support is increasingly turning them into civil servants.42 Swedish literature has developed through several phases since the early 1960s. Inevitably, there has been considerable overlap, but it is possible to distinguish an early period, up to the mid-1970s, characterised by political commitment; a middle period marked chiefly by an interest in wide-ranging forms of realism; and, since the early 1980s, a preoccupation with postmodernist issues. The politicisation of Swedish literature in the 1960s was dependent on two crucial developments. One was the mounting awareness of the world at large and of the huge social and economic problems of many countries, especially in the Third World. More extensive tourism abroad had begun to develop in the 1950s; and soon Swedish writers were reporting on their insights into life in other countries. Per Wastberg (born 1933) explored the effects of apartheid in South Africa in Forbjudet omrdde (Forbidden Area) and Pa svarta listan (Black-Listed), both of which appeared in 1960. Jan Myrdal (born 1927) visited China and wrote Rapport frdn en

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kinesisk by (Report from a Chinese Village, 1963). SaraLidman (born 1923) travelled in South Africa and Rhodesia and wrote novels set in these countries. Subsequently she reported from wartime Vietnam in Samtal i Hanoi (Conversations in Hanoi, 1966) (see Chapter 10). The reports soon began to focus on Sweden too. Thus Goran Palm (born 1933), who had highlighted the exploitation by the industrialised world of the developing countries in En ordttvis betraktelse (As Others See Us, 1966), went on to scrutinise Indoktrineringen i Sverige (Indoctrination in Sweden, 1968) and, subsequently, working conditions at LM Ericson, one of the country's major employers, in Ett dr pa LM (One Year at LM, 1972) and Bokslutfrdn LM (Balance Sheet from LM, 1974; selected extracts from the last two volumes published as The Flight from Work). Sara Lidman recorded the working experiences of employees in the state-owned iron mine at Kiruna, and her book Gruva (Iron Ore Mine, 1968), which includes a series of evocative photographs by Odd Uhrbom, has become closely associated with the strike that broke out in the northern iron ore mines not long after its publication. The report genre was clearly finding an eager audience, which is a pointer towards the second crucial element underlying the changes to the Swedish cultural scene, notably after about 1965. With the old class system largely eroded and the principle of equality broadly established throughout society, the general public was beginning to constitute a well educated and highly critical forum. The report genre is indicative of the ideological commitment expected from the arts during this period, a time when modernist art was criticised for being exclusive and inaccessible, when the 'culture pages' of a major daily such as Dagens Nyheter were opened up for debates on society and ideology as well as art, and when growing numbers of artists and writers rejected traditional labels in favour of the more egalitarian 'culture workers'. The interest in documentary writing that was so conspicuous in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s was utilised by women writers too. Thus Carin Mannheimer (born 1934) published Rapport om kvinnor (Report on Women) in 1969, and in 1977 a group of women active in Group 8 published Mo kvinnor, nio liv (Nine Women, Nine Lives). Kerstin Strandberg's (born 1932)

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Skriv, Kerstin, skrivl (Write, Kerstin, Write!, 1978) examines the situation of the woman artist and writer, challengingly infusing the documentary genre with an original and often poetic language. Marit Paulsen (born 1939) traced the situation of a woman shift worker in Du manniska? (You, My Fellow Human Being?, 1972) and has subsequently published a range of texts, the articles in Marit har ordet (Marit is Speaking, 1986) highlighting her interest in issues such as gender, ecology and pacifism. The most renowned text in this genre, however, was Maja Ekelof s (1918—1989) Rapport frdn en skurhink (Report from a Scouring-Pail, 1970). This authentic diary, depicting Maja Ekelof s struggle to support her family and herself by means of low-paid and monotonous work as a cleaner, also paints the picture of a woman who succeeds, despite her circumstances, in being genuinely involved in the events of the world. Maja Ekelofs humanity in combination with her material conditions (not owning a typewriter, she had to type the manuscript of her diary in the offices she was cleaning, taking care always to use a different typewriter so as not to arouse suspicions), engaged a wide audience. A preoccupation with existential issues predominates in the work of the leading male Swedish novelists of the 1970s and 1980s: Sven Delblanc (1931-1992), Lars Gustafsson (born 1936), and Per Gunnar Evander (born 1933); while Per Olov Enquist (born 1934) combines a strong interest in narrative form with a critical political commitment. The novels of Goran Tunstrom (born 1937), which constitute one of the most striking examples of the renewed significance of narrative since the 1970s, are remarkable because of the centrality of female characters. In Juloratoriet (The Christmas Oratorio, 1983), where the exuberant mixture of realism, fantasy and myth has led to comparisons with the 'magic realism' of the new Latin-American novel,43 one of the main female characters emerges as the embodiment of harmony, joy and creativity, the quest for her after her death foreshadowing the Eurydice myth which is developed with such skill in Goran Tunstrom's Tjuven (The Thief, 1986). While it is more difficult to generalise about the increasingly wide-ranging output by women writers, one starting-point, particularly conspicuous in the 1970s, is the concern with the

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conditions of women. In the wake of this, increasingly ambitious projects soon begin to take shape. Some of the most explicitly feminist novels in the 1970s were written by the Finland-Swedish author Marta Tikkanen (born 1935). Her early nu imorron (now tomorrow, 1970) is the monologue of a wife and mother of four struggling to create a minimum of space for herself; but Marta Tikkanen's breakthrough came in 1975 with Man kan inte vdldtas (Manrape). Tova Randers, employed in a library and the mother of two sons, is raped on her fortieth birthday and decides to take her revenge by raping the rapist, only to discover that her 'crime' is rendered invisible by a male-centred society unable to accept this kind of role reversal. The poems in Arhundradets kdrlekssaga (Love Story of the Century, 1978) frankly and vividly convey the plight of a family in which the husband and father is an alcoholic, the wife and mother drawing strength from a feminist awareness that inspires a sense of sisterhood. In the novel Rodluvan (Little Red Riding Hood, 1986) the situation of the mother and wife is explored in mythical terms. The Swedish novelist Inger Alfven (born 1940) has written a number of woman-centred books and at least one of them, Stadpatrullen (The Cleaning Patrol, 1976), is an explicitly feminist novel. Here a handful of women form their own cleaning co-operative, the narrative highlighting the emergence of a sense of individual identity and sisterhood as conventional women's roles and lifestyles are challenged along with male prejudices. Inger Alfven enjoyed considerable success with s/y Glddjen (The Yacht Joy) in 1979, a novel in which gender roles are explored in the confined setting of an ocean-going yacht. The disaster that has struck the family of four who originally built the yacht is investigated from the vantage point of a younger and more equal couple, whose exploits on the same vessel help to pinpoint the devastating inadequacy of traditional gender roles and also point towards a more balanced future. Arvedelen (The Inheritance, 1981) traces the experiences of four generations of women since the 1850s, showing up their struggle to assert their identity against the invisibility imposed on them by traditional roles. Only the last of the novel's generations succeeds in breaking out of this mould; and here the narrative also offers a perceptive analysis of a man's reactions to a woman's independence.

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The contributors to the wider exploration of women's conditions came from a range of different backgrounds. Thus AnnCharlotte Alverfors (born 1947) had grown up in a working-class home in a rural community in Smaland, and her trilogy about the young girl Getrud, begun with Sparvoga (Sparrow Eye) in 1975, had a strong autobiographical flavour. In an original and powerful language, these novels depict Getrud's transition from childhood to womanhood and her experience of the dual impact of an impoverished teenage culture and a colourful and extensive family network. Gun-Britt Sundstrom (born 1945), who came from a middle-class background and had published her first book at the age of twenty, wrote a woman-centred version, For Lydia (For Lydia, 1973), of Hjalmar Soderberg's complex love novel of 1912, Den allvarsamma kken (The Serious Game). Gun-Britt Sundstrom's Maken (The Spouse, 1976), which has a female first-person narrator and is set in the 1960s and 70s, explores the relationship between Martina and Gustav, both of whom are students at the University of Stockholm when the narrative begins. Perceptive and humorous, the novel highlights the dilemma of a young woman who is sceptical of woman's conventional role in marriage yet simultaneously dependent on love and affection. The mapping-out of women's conditions was given an additional dimension by the emergence of a number of older writers who drew encouragement and inspiration from the widespread interest in the experience of women. Gerda Antti's (born 1929) breakthrough came with Inte vtirre tin vanligt (No Worse than Usual, 1977), a collection of short stories whose female characters are marked by the invisibility and insignificance imposed by conventional social standards. Her novels Ett ogonblick i sdnder (Moment by Moment, 1980) and Jag reder mig nog (I'll Manage, 1983) are the low-key, first-person accounts of Astrid, initially unhappily married and subsequently widowed. Against the odds, she forges a life of her own, maintaining her independence in a new relationship. Several of the novels of Linnea Fjallstedt (born 1926) depict Sweden before the emergence of the welfare state, her first novel, Hungerpesten (The Plague of Hunger, 1975), painting a shocking picture of the starvation and poverty endured by the author's grandmother in the far north of the country at the beginning of the century. Yet there is also space for feminine pride, with women being central to the

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meagre subsistence economy of these isolated settlements. Urban poverty has been depicted by Helga Bergvall (born 1907), whose Jungfru Skdr (Virgin Pure, 1975) is a celebration of the life of her mother. This range of narratives by women, in combination with the conspicuous revival of epic prose fiction, undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of Kerstin Ekman (born 1933) and Sara Lidman (born 1923) as two of the major novelists of the past few decades. In the 1960s, Kerstin Ekman had become a renowned writer of thrillers; in retrospect she has described the genre as unambitious and, from her perspective, marginal: she wanted to write large-scale novels, but opted for a form still perceived as more appropriate to the woman writer.44 The tetralogy which she began with Haxringarna (Magic Circles) in 1974 can be seen as drawing on the current interest in recent Swedish history, illustrated, for example, by Sven Delblanc's four novels on rural Sodermanland and the growing prominence of the town of Sodertalje (1970—76); but Kerstin Ekman's novels depict developments over the past century or so from the women's point of view. There is no ostentatious feminism in these novels, but the consistent foregrounding of women's roles in the emergence of a Swedish town, initially a mere railway station but soon a complex twentieth-century structure, establishes a critical perspective on modern Swedish society. The fourth volume in the series highlighted Kerstin Ekman's skill in expanding beyond realism into the realms of symbolism and myth; and her subsequent work has testified to her originality and range as a writer (see Chapter 11). Sara Lidman had published her first novel, investigating moral issues in a tiny community in the far north of Sweden, as early as 1953; and the rest of her work during this decade established her as a significant novelist. She subsequently became one of the foremost exponents of the documentary and report genre, openly asserting that she was finding the novel inadequate for her purposes. Yet she made a spectacular return to the novel in the 1970s, with Din tjdnare hor (Thy Servant Heareth) from 1977 marking the beginning of a five-volume series. Again, the exploration of the past is at the centre, with Sara Lidman's novels tracing the late but much-heralded arrival of the railway in an isolated community not far from the Arctic Circle. While she does not foreground the

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experience of women to as great an extent as does Kerstin Ekman, the notion of the value and fragility of culture which is fundamental to her texts forms an obvious counterpoint to the male-dominated capitalism and imperialism that ruthlessly shape society at large in her books (see Chapter 10). The relative significance of women poets during the last few decades is related, at least in part, to second-wave feminism, with poetry, including songs, becoming important to the new women's movement. Sonja Akesson (1926-1977), who began publishing poetry in the 1950s, was discovered by feminists as early as the 1960s, her bleakly disillusioned, satirical and sometimes grotesque poems about women's everyday life making her into a figurehead of second-wave feminism (see Chapter 12). Elisabet Hermodsson (born 1927) is a writer, composer and artist whose prominence in the 1970s was largely based on poetry inspired by second-wave feminism. Her work is fuelled by a humanism sufficiently expansive to combine a Christian commitment with Marxism into a radicalism somewhat reminiscent of that of Birgitta Trotzig; and her preference for a mixture of media often results in challenging and evocative works of art that are notoriously difficult to pigeonhole. Her volume Dikt-ting (Poems Objects) from 1966 conflates poetry and pictures; and she was the writer of both the words and the music of the songs that made her so popular in the 1970s. Thus Vad go'r vi med sommaren, kammter (What Are We Doing to the Summer, Comrades, 1973) with its social criticism and emphatic pacifism was followed in 1974 by the highly successful Disa Nilssons visor (Disa Nilsson's Songs), subtitled Visor om sommaren, samhtillet, mannen och universum (Songs about Summer, Society, Man and the Universe). The volume is dedicated to Birger Sjoberg (1885—1929), famous for the conventionally idyllic and romantic songs in Fridas bok (Frida's Book, 1922). Elisabet Hermodsson explicitly sets out to present her central female character as a subject, not an object; and she deliberately transfers to Disa Nilsson many of the characteristics of the young man in Birger Sjoberg's poems: his thirst for learning, his ambitiousness, his proneness to profound meditation.45 Here the male world is contrasted with the revolutionary potential of a world of growth and change, linked with nature and with art.46 The feminist dimension of Elisabet Hermodsson's commitment is

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also apparent in the essays in Ord i kvinnotid (Words in Women's Time, 1979); and in the poems in Gor dig synlig (Make Yourself Visible, 1980) there are elements of matriarchal myth along with acknowledgements of the role of Elin Wagner. One of Elisabet Hermodsson's more recent works is the 'ecological oratorio' Skapelse utlamnad (Creation Abandoned), published in 1986. Marianne Fredriksson (born 1927) published her first work of fiction, Evas bok (The Book of Eve) in 1980, drawing on the context of Genesis to explore the borderlines between animal and human, masculine and feminine, inarticulateness and linguistic competence. She has subsequently written a number of novels exploring Biblical motifs, including Kains bok (The Book of Cain, 1981) and Syndafloden (The Flood, 1990). The poetry of Kristina Lugn (born 1948) has gained a very wide audience, her skilful use of language and rhythm opening up a world that is at once reassuringly familiar and the locus of loneliness and despair. Very many of Kristina Lugn's poems are written in the first person, the voice being that of an alienated and unhappy woman struggling to cope in a society that is strikingly reminiscent of contemporary Sweden. Again and again, the safety and security offered by the welfare state are found to be wanting by a female self refusing to accept that life is no more than its material circumstances; and ultimately only irony and satire seem to be keeping the threat of breakdown and disintegration at bay. The following untitled poem appeared in Kristina Lugn's second collection, Till min man, om han kunde lasa (For my Husband, if He Were Able to Read, 1976): From our little cottage on the shore of the Lake of Imagination and high up from the distant mountain Almighty Paranoia we are now appealing in unison to You, You blessed Normality, eternally praiseworthy Quiet Assurance, always enviable Sober Realism and Common Sense and praying to You for the sake of our common ignorance finally to forgive us for what our eyes

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Women playwrights also gained prominence in the 1970s. Suzanne Osten (born 1944) and Margareta Garpe (born 1944) were inspired by second-wave feminism into writing plays which drew on a Brechtian cabaret style to convey their message. Kdrleksfdrestdllningen (The Notion of Love/The Play about Love, 1973) is a play about pornography which makes an ambitious attempt to pinpoint some of the values underlying the reification of woman and the commercialisation of sex and violence. The juxtaposition with the lives of ordinary people helps to highlight both the dangerous distortions stemming from pornography and the emotional impoverishment on which it thrives. Characteristically, the published version of this play, along with Suzanne Osten's and Margareta Garpe's subsequent one which is even better known,Jossesflickor (Good God Girls, 1974), contains much encouragement to groups thinking of performing the plays and some detailed advice on how to go about it. Good God Girls presents essential herstory by exploring half a century of the women's movement in Sweden, emphasising the desperate urgency of the early struggle but also questioning the effect of the pervading reformism in the light of the feminism of the 1970s. Agneta Pleijel (born 1940), who has subsequently enjoyed success both as a poet and a novelist, made her mark as a playwright in the second half of the 1970s. Her best-known work for the stage is her play about Alexandra Kollontai (see Chapter 12). The postmodern condition has profoundly affected Swedish literature of the last two decades. Its effect has been described as that of a 'giant hangover', particularly marked in Sweden because of the prominence of political ideologies in the writing of the 1960s and 1970s: 'after the quest for Everything' in the previous decades came 'the belief in Nothing'.48 As Patricia Waugh has pointed out, postmodernism shares many central concerns with feminism, .with a major difference represented by the approach to identity: 'As male writers lament its demise, women writers have not yet experienced that subjectivity which will give them a sense of personal autonomy, continuous identity, history and agency

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in the world'.49 What Patricia Waugh has discerned in many feminist texts from the past couple of decades, however, is not an essentialist notion of identity — nor a postmodernist rejection of the subject — but rather what she has termed 'self in relationship'.50 In her analysis, much contemporary feminist writing has modified traditional humanist notions previously perceived as fundamental to the concept of identity in order to emphasise the provisionality and positionality of gender and the discursive production of knowledge and power. What many of these texts suggest is that it is possible to experience oneself as a strong and coherent agent in the world, at the same time as understanding the extent to which identity and gender are socially constructed and represented.51 Recent women's writing in Sweden tends not to be explicitly feminist in the way of many of the works discussed above. But as we approach the texts of the last couple of decades, Patricia Waugh's notion of self in relationship seems to me to offer a useful guiding idea. Sometimes more relevant, sometimes less, it helps to underline the continuities of women's writing in what is fast becoming a new era of prolific and exciting output. In the autobiographical trilogy of Sun Axelsson (born 1935), Drommen om ett liv (The Dream of a Life, 1978), Honungsvargar (Honey Wolves, 1984) and Nattens drstid (Night's Season, 1989), the debt to women's texts of the 1970s with their emphasis on feminine experience is obvious.52 Thus the vague definition of the self initially projected by Sun Axelsson's first-person narrator necessarily enhances her vulnerability, but ultimately this character achieves a new awareness of the 'structures that have contributed to the position of the I'.53 The struggle involved is perhaps most palpable in the final volume with its unflinching examination of a masochistic desire for submission that is only gradually overcome and transformed into insight and a critical perspective. Inger Edelfeldt's (born 1956) books also add a masochistic dimension to their explorations of feminine socialisation and the relations between women and men. A short story such as 'Snalla snalla Jenny' ('Please Please Jenny') in the collection Ifiskens mage (In the Belly of the Fish, 1984) portrays the self-disgust experienced by an anorexic girl; and the novel Kamalas bok (Kamala's Book,

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1986) wallows in the boredom and superficiality of a young woman's life, the rebellion of the imaginary Kamala no more than a distant possibility. The novel, however, can also be read as a parody of a woman's supposed dependence on men; and this parodic dimension is more clearly marked in the novel entitled Den tdta elden (The Dense Fire, 1987) with its uncompromising examinations of feminine and masculine. In the short stories in Rit (Ritual, 1991) and Den fdrunderliga kameleonten (The Remarkable Chameleon, 1995) the boundaries between a familiar 'reality' and other worlds are called into question as feminine identity is subjected to a many-faceted exploration. The early texts of Mare Kandre (born 1962) highlight feminine experience centring on the female body whose sensations, in these poems and poetic prose texts, effectively structure the surrounding world. The more wide-ranging investigations of her later work continue to retain a strong feminine focus (see Chapter 12). In a context of alienation and fragmentation, the body is also central to the work of Eva Runefelt (born 1953). Her first novel, I svackan (In the Hollow, 1975), depicts a young girl's quest for a language in which to formulate the existential issues that are central to her; and both here and in the author's first book of poetry, En kommande tid av livet (A Future Time of Life, 1975), the affinity of the physical relationship emerges as decisive. The poems in Aldriga och bargsliga trakter (Aged and Childish Regions, 1978) formulate a desire for transcendence which has been developed still further in the collection called Augusti (August, 1981). Here this desire is encapsulated in the tide, the heat of August, according to Eva Runefelt, dissolving conventional boundaries: 'The air around me becomes as much body as I myself am air'.54 Nature is crucial to the experience of new and different affinities, but the focal point is the love relationship, more significant here than in Eva Runefelt's earlier texts. In the poems in Langs ett oavslutat ogonblick (Along an Unfinished Moment, 1986), the geographical settings are strongly present and painted in evocative detail; but in the last instance they form a backdrop to the dissolution of space and time, eagerly sought for and palpable in many of these texts. In the writing of Eva Strom (born 1947) the female body is at the centre of a project aimed at reaching experiences beyond language, at the level of dream and myth.55 While Eva Strom's

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first books of poetry, Den brinnande zeppelinaren (The Burning Zeppelin, 1977) and Steinkind (Steinkind, 1979), formulate a search for feminine identity that includes experimentation with a range of roles,56 the latter volume in particular also highlights the crucial theme of imprisonment and the urge for freedom. This theme is further developed in the poems in Akra (Akra, 1983); and in a novel such as Det mo'rka alfabetet (The Dark Alphabet, 1982) the flat, rational language of a doctor envelops the unfettered images of a schizophrenic woman. In the poems in Brandenburg (1993) the clipped rhythms of the end-stopped lines reinforce a disjunction, a sense of fragmentation, that emerges as part of the apocalyptic perspective on the contemporary world. An older, more harmonious system, strongly reinforced by myth, surfaces only in brief glimpses. The poetry of Ann Jaderlund (born 1955) amounts to a more radical questioning of systems of signs and meaning. Not only do her texts depict a world in a state of flux: 'I want', Ann Jaderlund has said, 'to renounce the view that a finite meaning exists'.57 In the poems in Rundkyrka och sjukhuslangor vid vattnet Himlen drforgylld av solens sista strdlar (Round Church and Hospital Blocks by the Water The Sky is Golden from the Last Rays of the Sun, 1982) the lack of fixity is not only prominent in relations between lovers or between humankind and nature; it is also formulated at the level of rhythm, in the almost hypnotically effective flow of Ann Jaderlund's four-line stanzas, marker morka morkt kristaller (darkness dark darkly crystal, 1994) uses an incantatory rhythm to outline an annual cycle with strong elements of both eroticism and Christianity and 'with a repeated questioning of boundaries. Here the syntax has dissolved to the point where we have to study each word anew and experiment with a range of potential connections and meanings. The search for the means of formulating the unspoken also underlies the poetry and poetic prose of Katarina Frostenson (born 1953). Katarina Frostenson, who joined the Swedish Academy in 1992 as its fifth woman member, has pointed to the work of Birgitta Trotzig, Karin Boye and the Romantic poet Erik Johan Stagnelius as sources of inspiration;58 and she has described her writing in terms of dispersing and gathering, 'spreading words and collecting them'.59 The preoccupation with form to which

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Katarina Frostenson has frequently referred amounts to direct links between her texts and music: the page of the book, she has said, should be 'a picture and a music score in one'.60 Shunning the one-sidedness of rational order and organisation, her texts highlight words, sounds and rhythms in terms that also open up on to a broad range of intertexts. Katarina Frostenson's breakthrough came with the collection entitled Rena land (Clean Lands, 1980), in which some central texts depict a stiflingly equalised and levelled-down Swedish society. The two subsequent collections, Den andra (The Other, 1982) and / del gula (In the Yellow, 1985), can be read as explorations of antithetical strategies, central to which is the search for a language and perception that are intuitive rather than cognitive.61 The prose texts in Berattelser frdn dom (Tales from Them, 1992) also investigate language, the contrast between a community's original and frequently ritual forms of communication and the language introduced by a man from outside recalling Lacanian theories of language and socialisation. The poems in the collection Joner (Ions, 1991) have been described by Katarina Frostenson as the product of an overwhelming desire to write vertically.62 The middle section of the volume is based on a medieval ballad about the pursuit and killing of a virgin in the guise of a hind, the close examination of one crucial element of the ballad after the other reinforcing the centrality of an insistent female voice. But language and freedom again stand out as major themes throughout this collection, as illustrated by the following poem from the first section of Ions: YOU

(I am fixated on you) You eclipse words

you are my thought the sun I cannot think in your proximity dazzled —

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when you lie shadow grows. Flames — the rose possibilities

All is not thorn and truth great is the sweet range of the word when don't you lie? — it is no decree63 Women in Sweden, according to an official study in the early 1970s, devote almost twice as much of their time to reading for pleasure as do men.64 However, the average woman reads popular weeklies far more frequently than she reads books, and her choice of books tends to be dominated by romantic novels and, to a lesser extent, thrillers.65 In the second half of the 1980s, two women authors were among the top three in the borrowing statistics of the Swedish public libraries, but they have not figured prominently, if at all, in this book.66 Alice Lyttkens (1897-1992) published her first book in the 1930s and soon established a reputation for her romantic novels, which frequently draw on historical settings but also show a preference for independent working women. Maria Lang (pseudonym of Dagmar Lange, 1914—1991) wrote a number of highly successful thrillers. Besides, no survey of popular fiction in Sweden this century could possibly ignore the name of Sigge Stark (pseudonym of Signe Bjornberg, 1896-1964), who published around 130 romantic novels. Not only were the print-runs huge by Swedish standards, with a minimum of 15,000 copies per novel,67 but Sigge Stark's books also won big audiences in the other Scandinavian countries. As for highbrow literature in Sweden, the prospects by the early 1970s were regarded as very bleak, chiefly due to competition from other media.68 Although literature in translation, especially from some of the major English-speaking countries, continues to exert considerable pressure, it is true to say that Swedish literature has survived the 'crisis' frequently referred to in the early 1970s very

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well, with the new forms of state support undoubtedly making an important contribution. Particularly encouraging has been the prominence of the work of new women writers over the past few decades. From a mid-1990s perspective, the future for women's writing in Sweden looks anything but bleak.

w

Sara Lidman (bom 1923) POLITICS AND LIFE

Sara Lidman's oeuvre illustrates a distinctive development in Swedish literature from the 1950s to the 1970s. Initially Sara Lidman, whose first novel appeared in 1953, examined moral and ethical issues in an isolated northern community, but in the 1960s, lengthy stays in Africa and subsequently in North Vietnam helped to transform her perspective. After two novels reflecting her African experience she distanced herself from the novel, concentrating instead on articles, reports and speeches. But in the second half of the 1970s she made a triumphant return to her first genre as she embarked on what was to be a five-volume work, charting the consequences of the arrival of the railway in a small community in the far north of Sweden. For the second volume in the series she received the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1980; and the work as a whole amounts to one of the most significant contributions to the late twentieth-century Swedish novel. Sara Lidman's native village is Missentrask, close to the Arctic Circle. Sara Lidman's father and her paternal grandmother were both good storytellers, a tradition which she has linked to the extreme climate: verbal skills taking the form of quick-witted replies or stories expanding into small sketches were developed as antidotes to the cold and the snow.1 Sara was the second youngest of five brothers and sisters and went to school in the village, which consisted of about thirty families.2 She has subsequently spoken of the significance of this village: That this world is a mystery, that it was utterly enormous and beyond all sense at all kinds of levels, as earth, as heaven, as pain, as the most formidable love, as the bottom-most fear. That the devil and all angels were close around, of this I was aware by the age of five.3

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In Sara Lidman's output, the village is all important. In a national context, she has pointed out, the publication of her first novels coincided with the beginning of a period of depopulation of rural areas, with profound effects on the members of the communities, their customs and their language; but it took her experiences of Africa and, in particular, Vietnam, for her to perceive the significance of these developments.4 She recently chose to summarise her contribution to Swedish literature in the following terms: 'SL's oeuvre does not belong among the great ones in the Swedish language. But she has done some good in that she has captured certain aspects of village life prior to the final enforced recruitment to the cities'.5 Sara Lidman spent part of her adolescence at a sanatorium where she was treated for tuberculosis, an experience which she has described as a major piece of good luck: 'It was wonderful. All these people and all this bustling life and you were allowed to read and so many things were happening'.6 She subsequently completed her secondary education, took a degree in English and French at the University of Uppsala and became a teacher of English in Smaland, in the south of the country, where she embarked on her first novel. Sara Lidman has referred to her encounter with South Africa in the early 1960s, after she had established herself as one of Sweden's most promising young writers, as a watershed.7 Back in Sweden, she studied political texts and began to perceive the connections between the developing countries and the poverty of her native country in the past;8 and when she went to live in Kenya in 1962-63, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth became a further seminal text for her.9 Even in the 1950s, Sara Lidman was voicing her concern about the general drift of political language, increasingly used, in her opinion, to manipulate and deceive and to make acceptable among the general public crucial shifts in meaning and position.10 Characteristically her interest in Vietnam, at a time when the war had recently begun, was sparked off by her conviction that most of the media were painting an untruthful picture of the country. Sara Lidman began to study the history and literature of Vietnam, and as a result of her interest, she got permission to visit North Vietnam.11

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'In the villages of the world', Sara Lidman has written, 'people seldom know what literature is. But they know that there are words as living as water to someone who is parched with thirst and words as dangerous as spears'.12 The author of fiction, in her opinion, is responsible for cleansing language and restoring its pith.13 She has developed a special interest in the abstract, polysyllabic neologisms of Swedish bureaucracy and politics and has resorted to taking these words apart by means of hyphens in order to alert her readers to their meaning. In Gruva (Iron Ore Mine, 1968), her best known work in the report genre, she not only made a point of retaining the words of the workers she interviewed but also rejected her original plan to contribute her own verbal portraits: the words of the miners had to be allowed to speak for themselves.14 Her five-volume railway series, highlighting both oral and written traditions, displays a stylistic complexity and virtuosity exceptional in contemporary Swedish literature. In the mid-1970s, Sara Lidman returned to Missentrask where she now lives in the house where she was born. Her radicalised interests in the village and in language, the major continuities in her output, have spawned a preoccupation with the environment at large, and not least with the treatment of the forests of the earth; and Sara Lidman's involvement in all these areas is reflected both in outspoken articles and, more subtly but certainly no less convincingly, in her novels. Her radicalism is also mirrored in the list of works and authors she regards as significant influences: headed by Marx, the Bible and the early seventeenth-century German mystic Jakob Bohme, it includes writers such as Isaac Babel, Miguel Asturias and Halldor Laxness and, among Swedish authors, Stina Aronson and Birgitta Trotzig.15 EARLY NOVELS

Sara Lidman's first novel, Tjdrdalen (The Tar Pit, 1953), is an examination of the moral stature and cohesion of a village, culminating in a severe collective judgement; yet at the same time, the text also amounts to a celebration of the community. As so often in Sara Lidman's books, we are in a small village in the far north where the isolation and the climate make the struggle for survival palpable. The role of the women is central, the text portraying them as the producers of food and the providers of

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care, support and love..The marital relationships are characterised by a notable equality, a natural comradeship enforced by the circumstances. Subtly and economically, the text conveys the tenderness and sense of expectation between Nils and Agda on the morning when he is to start firing his tar pit, the result of a year's hard work. The relationship between Petrus and Betty, on the other hand, has been tested by nearly two decades of drudgery and financial worries, but husband and wife have succeeded in retaining a playfulness which emerges as an aspect of their deep affinity. The plot is concentrated into a single summer's week. Nils arrives to fire his tar pit, only to find the elaborate structure ruined and the village outcast trapped among the fallen timbers. The man, known as The Fox, is carried with his broken leg to Vendla, a mentally handicapped woman who takes care of him. But the men who take him there are indignant about his destruction of the tar pit and fail to secure for him the medical help he requires. They also avoid informing Petrus. When Petrus eventually learns about The Fox's plight, he is dying from gangrene. Sara Lidman was subsequently to develop several of Petrus's features in her female characters: the underlying ambivalence may explain why he emerges, at least in part, as an idealised figure. With his moral uprightness and skill in using words, Petrus is thus the obvious character to formulate the text's central message — italicised in the original — about mutual responsibility: 'We must never become so poor that we cannot afford to let a useless person live among us. Are you listening to what I am saying, if we become that poor, then we'll be just animals, all of us. And then nothing matters any more'.16 From this crucial conviction Sara Lidman never wavers. The sense of mutual responsibility is fundamental not only to the role of the village in her texts but, gradually, to the treatment of all her characters. The village fails the test, with the doctor labelling the inaction 'collective murder'.17 For Petrus the disaster combines with a financial crisis that makes him and his wife consider leaving the village for the sake of the iron ore mines; and he is emphatically cut down to size when he goes to borrow money from a member of the community who is known to be making a profit from the tar pit disaster. Embodying a desire

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to break away and get out that is latent in this text, Petrus nevertheless chooses to borrow, yet again, in order to stay in the village. Paradoxically, then, Sara Lidman's novel reaffirms the significance of the village despite its harsh criticism of its failings. This reaffirmation combines with the stylistic innovations in the text, innovations which can be seen as linked with Petrus's skill with words. In the last instance, the verbal confidence and pleasure with which the village is depicted, be the aspects negative or positive, emerge as fundamental to the text's celebration of it. Thirty years after the publication of The Tar Pit, Sara Lidman claimed that this novel, in common with other early works, was no more than a 'writing exercise'.18 As a writing exercise it is exceptionally advanced, triumphantly pinpointing the author's seminal relationship with the village and prefiguring, at the level of language and style, practices which were to be developed to perfection in the railway series. Sara Lidman's second novel, Hjortronlandet (Cloudberry Country, 1955), uses much the same setting as her first, and a few of the characters also reappear. But the narrative perspective is wider: this could be described as a collective novel. The focal point of the narrative is 'The Island', a community consisting of four crofting families, tenants of the state who are expected to make a living from the boggy and inhospitable land. The female characters are more significant than in the earlier novel, and they represent a spectrum of different types. Huge and square, Stina is the mother figure, in charge of a house bursting with children and invariably at the centre of jokes and laughter as well as endless toil. Hilda, on the other hand, is trapped between an ingrained respect for her husband and sons and the consequences of their inaction: in this Darwinian struggle for survival they are the ones who have given up, and it falls on Hilda to beg and to borrow in order to keep the family alive. Anna who is older, with a grown-up son, introduces a different feminine dimension: skilled at assisting women in childbirth, she is also well known for her supernatural gifts which have an all-pervasive role in the community. Frida, finally, is married to Anna's son and prone to romantic dreams: her daughter Claudette, who plays a significant role in the narrative, is named after the heroine of a French novel.

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Although the importance of the community remains unquestionable, the concomitant desire to break away is even more marked than in Sara Lidman's first novel. The relationship between 'The Island' and the more affluent village underlines a craving for change that is embodied in several of the characters — in the young boy who contrives an ailment that guarantees him an exciting visit to the doctor, in the frustrated school-teacher who has had a taste of the outside world only to find herself trapped in this rural wilderness, and last but not least in Claudette herself, who mirrors several of the features of Petrus in The Tar Pit. Thus she is in love with words and reading; and she discerns her language not in the local dialect but in books. Her desire to break away from the community is reflected in her conviction that she truly belongs not on 'The Island' but in the village: her 'internal villager' makes her feel at odds with herself,19 and towards the end of the novel she is indeed on her way to further training in the nearest town. Her relationship with Anna, her grandmother, is shot through with affection and affinity as the older woman's stories and powers help to open up to Claudette a world beyond that of'The Island'. Cloudberry Country paints a convincing picture of a small and isolated community, and the attention to a whole collective of characters is testimony to the growing confidence of the author. At the same time, however, the narrative is self-conscious, its style noticeably more cautious and conventional than that of The Tar Pit, and its emphasis on its aesthetic status jarring with the subject matter. Claudette, given a name from a novel that no one on 'The Island' is able to pronounce correctly, illustrates this cultural chasm; and in the last instance, the text seems to query its own project, the relevance of producing novels about characters like those on 'The Island'. The theme of the community and the outsider is given a very different treatment in Regnspiran (The Rain Bird, 1958), a psychological novel revolving around a female character who must be regarded as one of Sara Lidman's greatest creations. The setting is similar to that of her first two novels, with glimpses of familiar characters; but the centre stage belongs to Linda Stahl, whose development is traced from infancy to early adulthood. The impact of the text is heightened by an unpredictability that on occasion seems to take even the narrator by surprise; Sara Lidman

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has admitted that 'Before I began the actual writing, I thought I knew her [Linda] perfectly, but then she became more and more difficult to manage'.20 Linda Stahl embodies a difference so powerful that all the traditional community loyalties are called into question, an effect that becomes particularly provocative in view of the fact that she is female. The text provides several sets of explanations for her personality and actions. One of them is psychological: while Linda's father is a sternly religious man, her mother's spontaneous warmth and love make her dote on her only child, born after many years of marriage. Between mother and daughter there is a semiotic relationship, in clear contrast to the Logos represented by the father; and the conflict points ahead, to the confrontations that will shape Linda's life. Another set of explanations is bound up with Linda's intellectual and artistic gifts. The skill with words that we have encountered in Petrus in The Tar Pit and Claudette in Cloudberry Country is even more pronounced in the character of Linda, with the young girl convinced that the words printed in books are longing to be spoken by her, and that the buildings and landscape around her have such a desire for words that she must read aloud to them.21 Linda is also known for her ability to imitate the other villagers, her imitations growing into veritable performances when she becomes old enough to entertain her peers by playing dance music for them. Linda's empathy seems to be reflected in the bolder technique of this novel, with the narrator entering the minds of the characters with a sensitivity that points ahead to the railway series. Linda, finally, is also shaped by her affinity with the supernatural. She embodies some of the characteristics of Anna in Cloudberry Country, but again, these are significantly radicalised. Linda has Sami ancestry22 and is capable of second sight; and the story repeatedly connects her with Vattberget, home of the subterranean people with their power to capture and destroy human beings. Vattberget, where Linda's parents have a summer shieling, becomes an epitome of the untamed wilderness which is a persistent threat to the community: Linda is aware that if she were to 'learn to understand the language and signs of Vattberget she might be changed, sucked back to a life close to the moss and perhaps forget that which was

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human. And she did not have an ounce to spare of her humanity'.23 Significantly, some of the turning-points of the story occur in this setting: it is when Linda's father is alone at Vattberget felling timber that his daughter, still only a small child, has a vision of his fatal accident, the incident that begins to set her apart from the other villagers; and at the shieling Linda, aged twelve, indulges in her first sexual experiences with Simon, the fosterchild of one of the families in the village. When Simon subsequently has to go away to prepare for his confirmation and the minister unveils his continuing sexual practices, Linda declines to save him. The Rain Bird can be read as an investigation of a femininity which is the foundation of the community but which, in its negative version, is merciless and destructive. In Cloudberry Country the mother figure, Stina, briefly flouts the community's rules and has an affair with Claudette's father, only to experience a childbirth that nearly claims her life. Linda in The Rain Bird similarly unleashes her sexuality, but she oversteps the rules consistently, flagrantly and without retribution. The bird that has given its name to the novel symbolises the forbidden sphere that Linda embodies: 'Oh, it is going to rain, is it?', people say when they hear it in order to subdue its message, for it was the rain bird that 'disturbed Adam's rest in God by singing about the doomed life on earth in such a way that Adam became sick with desire to try it'.24 Linda's sexuality is the ruin of Simon, the boy on whom a neighbouring family have taken pity, and her sexuality also destroys the life of a daughter in the same family as Linda becomes pregnant by the girl's fiance. After the inexplicable disappearance of her fiance, Ulrika follows the pregnancy, is present at the birth and helps to look after the baby, seemingly unaware of the truth. This extended close-up of Linda's deceitfulness, which culminates in Ulrika's suicide, pinpoints the extreme contrast of that femininity which is the foundation of villages and communities. The fearless consistency makes Sara Lidman's portrait of Linda an exceptional one, but when she writes the second novel in the series, Barn mistel (Carrying the Mistletoe, 1960), it is as if she has been gripped by remorse at what she had unleashed in her previous work. Taken together, the novels thus illustrate the importance of containing lawlessness. In Carrying the Mistletoe Linda has grown up and is running a small hotel away from her home village. She falls

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in love with a musician and tours with him during the summer; but Bjorn turns out to be a homosexual, and Linda is condemned to emotional dependence on a man who is not interested in giving her anything in return. The emphasis on sexuality remains, but Linda is punished by her entrapment in a cruel limbo. REACTIONS TO OPPRESSION

By 1968 Sara Lidman, later to call the village of Missentrask her 'first university',25 described Vietnam as 'the university of our time'.26 Her knowledge of Vietnam, the result of several visits, turned her into a figurehead of the Swedish anti-war movement; but her political commitment had drawn its initial inspiration from her encounter with Africa in the first half of the 1960s. Starting with Jag och min son (I and My Son, 1961), her first novel in an African setting, there is a more or less pronounced political dimension to all her texts, which is subsequently more sharply focused as a result of her experiences of Vietnam. After her return to the novel in 1977, Sara Lidman has continued to publish articles and speeches, making it clear in the preface to one of her collections, Varje lov dr ett oga (Each Leaf Is an Eye, 1980), that the two genres fulfil quite different functions: In a novel there is a rage, an anger that does not have to raise its voice. At best there is also a love so deep that it does not 'have to' glitter on the surface. The novel is stammering forth its replies to a life-long challenge. The article on the other hand has the immediacy of a lighted fuse. You write it when the image of a course of events provided by the mass media has dammed up such a frenzy inside you that you can get no space for working on your novel until you have made your protest.27 Sara Lidman has published four collections of articles to date — with most of the texts originally printed in daily papers — plus a couple of documentary books, and has castigated the critics for treating these genres with less respect than the novel: all literature, she insists, must be taken seriously.28 It is worth noticing that Sara Lidman, confronted with Africa,

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continued to use the one genre with which she was familiar; and some of the themes of her Norrland novels do indeed recur with remarkable consistency. But both her African texts show problems with approaching and accommodating the material, and neither is a successful novel. It is perhaps a measure of Sara Lidman's uncertainty as to how to handle her new material that she has made the narrator in / and My Son, her only novel to be narrated in the first person, into a man and a white man at that. Her middle-aged Swede is in South Africa with his young son in the hope of making money quickly so as to be able to return to a trouble-free life on the family farm in northern Sweden. The perspective of the ruthless white capitalist jars both with elements of the story, notably its interest in the conditions of the black people, and with a style that occasionally strives towards the lyrical. The self-deceit of the narrator and the psychological roots of his obsessive relationship with his son destabilise his superior stance; but as a tool for conveying Sara Lidman's encounter with South Africa, he seems inadequate. Interestingly, however, his project is juxtaposed with that of a Scots woman who has come to South Africa in search of her mother and discovers her in a state of poverty and degradation, conditions that underline a sense of affinity with the black community. Beneath the narrator's more palpable desire for change, there is a craving for love and belonging which Kathleen's quest helps to focus. This submerged craving can be seen to point towards the perpetual failure of the conqueror, bringing out the poverty of his material spoils in the light of the inaccessible cultural riches held by those he is trying to oppress and control. In Medfem diamanter (With Five Diamonds, 1964) black culture is at the centre; and this identification has benefited language and style as well as setting and characters. With Five Diamonds has a stylistic sophistication that surpasses anything to be found in Sara Lidman's earlier novels. The depiction of the Kenyan setting is vivid and powerful, the rural community, within sight of the magical mountain Kere-Nyaga, contrasting with the deprivation and claustrophobia of the urban settings. Sara Lidman has succeeded, too, in making her characters convincing: the love between Wachira and Wambura remains perfectly credible as it provides

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an initial hint of paradisical bliss, and the gradual disintegration of their relationship becomes a measure of white control that is persuasive without being ostentatious. Samtal i Hanoi (Conversations in Hanoi), first published in 1966 and reprinted in 1971, is a collection of short, largely documentary chapters tracing Sara Lidman's first visit to Vietnam and detailing her interviews with a wide range of people. The book is a celebration of the dignity and pride of the Vietnamese people in the face of American aggression, highlighting the role of their strong rural communities, far-reaching traditions and inspired ingenuity in coping with repeated attacks and ever more devastating weapons. Sara Lidman clearly idealises the Vietnamese people and avoids any controversial questions; but her explorations of the confrontation between traditional farming communities and an enemy able to draw on the latest technological developments provide crucial pointers to her subsequent preoccupations. In common with the articles in her later collection on Vietnam, Fdglarna i Nam Dinh (The Birds of Nam Dinh, 1974), these texts also depend for their impact on the author's striking observational and stylistic skills. The articles in Vdnner och u-vdnner (Friends and Developing Friends), published between 1964 and 1968 and collected in 1969, offer a wider perspective on oppression and exploitation. South Africa and Vietnam remain focal points, but in the context of a carefully sustained analysis of capitalism. Here Swedish companies are castigated too: at a time when the politicians of the country are condemning South Africa's apartheid, Sara Lidman is able to pinpoint an important and expanding Swedish economic presence in South Africa.29 In her most celebrated work of non-fiction, the volume Gruva (Iron Ore Mine, 1968), Sara Lidman's interviews with the workers in the state-owned mines at Kiruna accompany Odd Uhrbom's unvarnished black and white photographs. Sara Lidman has pointed to the role of Jan Myrdal's Report from a Chinese Village for her documentary approach in Iron Ore Mine,30 and has emphasised that workers were almost absent from contemporary Swedish literature when her volume appeared, the general opinion, moreover, being that they were enjoying excellent conditions.31 With its revelations, through the words of the workers, about the stress of working underground, with dangerous machinery and in constant noise, and about the effects on their lives of accidents and

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illnesses resulting from these conditions, the book caused a sensation which was all the greater because it focused on a state-run company, and this at a time when Sweden had had a succession of Social Democratic Governments for almost four decades. One of her best reviews, Sara Lidman has said, came from a worker who said: 'This book is like a letter from comrades whom I know and see, but to whom I can never speak because the noise in the plant is so terrible'.32 The book has been widely linked to the miners' strike that hit the Kiruna mines in 1969-70, but Sara Lidman herself believes there was no direct connection.33 Every Leaf Is an Eye consists of articles written between 1969 and 1980. The title is a Vietnamese saying that captures the affinity between the generations and their environment; and the volume strikingly brings together Sara Lidman's interests in Vietnam, Sweden and the wider world. The three main topics, Vietnam, the forest and popular literature about violence and sex, have American-led capitalism as their common denominator. Pinpointing the ideological significance of Sara Lidman's encounter with American capitalism and imperialism in Vietnam, the volume illustrates the effectiveness of her parallel analysis of certain Swedish developments, especially in the north of the country. A notable example is Samuel Huntington's article 'The Bases of Accommodation' (1968), a seminal text for American strategy in Vietnam whose argument in favour of 'forced draft urbanization', away from the rural areas which were the stronghold of the Vietcong gerilla, Sara Lidman sees replicated, more modestly but no less devastatingly, in the on-going depopulation of the northern parts of Sweden.34 Deforestation, an important strategy of Samuel Huntington's, plays a central role in the Swedish process too, she argues, stressing her conviction that forests, in common with air and water, should not be subject to ownership and exploitation.35 And she perceives a connection between the treatment of her country's forests and the treatment of Swedish culture: the predominance on Swedish television of American films and the wide availability of popular American fiction in translation are devastating the Swedish language and threatening the survival of a native culture.36 The articles in och trddet svarade (and the tree replied, 1988) testify to Sara Lidman's continuing preoccupation with these themes.

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THE RAILWAY SERIES

Sara Lidman has vividly described her sense of lacking a language when she wanted to convey her experiences of Vietnam: 'My ordinary shoes were too small, the marching-boots of my new comrades were too big, and barefoot I was only able to walk for short distances'.37 Her railway series, consisting of Din tjdnare hor (Thy Servant Heareth, 1977), Vredens bam (The Children of Wrath, 1979), Nabots sten (Naboth's Stone, 1981), Den underbare mannen (The Wonderful Man, 1983), and Jarnkronan (The Iron Crown, 1985), is first and foremost about finding a language, or rather languages, for her native northern landscape, its characters and their stories; and here, it is true to say, Sara Lidman succeeds in walking barefoot throughout. There is nothing in the railway series of the aesthetic hesitation that surfaces in Cloudberry Country: the vocabulary and style of these five novels spring from a profound conviction as to the significance of the setting and subject matter, with their remarkable linguistic and stylistic breadth emerging as integral to the overall theme. Dialect is more prominent in the railway series than in any other work of Sara Lidman's set in the north of Sweden. The dialect words, translated in brackets and/or explained in lists at the end of each volume, convey a strong sense of identity, pride and empathy. The dialect has also inspired the elliptical syntactic structures which become increasingly common as the series develops, and which similarly focus on the role of language per se and necessitate attentive reading and listening. The dialect of these five novels, furthermore, is reinforced by biblicisms, employed in terms that are notably concrete and down to earth, at once stressing and bridging the geographical chasm between the land of the Bible and the Lillvattnet of the novels. The type of sketches familiar from novels such as The Tar Pit and The Rain Bird appear in more elaborate form here, with Klapp-Jani's version of the minister announcing details of a horse that has disappeared growing into a communal celebration of rhythm and words. And the impact of a sketch of this kind is extensive: If, one evening in January, you felt that time had stopped and forgotten you, you would be saved if you were able to remember just one of Klapp-Jani's imitations. How something

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could be so comical on the surface and yet at bottom so sad! Then you would experience an oscillation between the fun of the surface and the foundation of pain, and time would again start moving and one morning, surely, spring would come and it would be time to let the horses out into the forest.38 Sections of the text of these novels are broken up typographically, giving unexpected prominence to individual words, phrases and rhythms. As the series develops, these sections mix narrative, direct speech, indirect speech, thoughts and dreams in a way that obliterates any distinct boundaries, undercutting the omniscience of the narrator and foregrounding more elusive modes of character expression and communication. An early instance depicts a wintertime journey: Six miles up country, without a cottage, without an encounter, without sun or moon, without a road to be seen. All that can be seen is snow-covered spruce and fir, moving towards you unendingly until you are seized with fear and "with mounting respect for the Horse who manages to veer just in time to prevent you from being buried under snow and pine needles how the Horse finds the road and keeps to it it is a miracle and the most insignificant fellow traveller becomes valuable his voice, his breath, his movements and all the memories that go with him compressed into one tenacious being maintaining the difference between itself and these monotonous omnipotent straggling trees39 Specific though it is, Sara Lidman's community on the very edge of civilisation assumes universal proportions. It becomes a metaphor for the significance and fragility of culture in an environment where vast tracts of land bear no trace of human presence, where scattered, abandoned huts testify to the failed efforts of settlers, and where a smallholding that has been inhabited for three or

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four generations stands as an exception, exuding a smell of people that conveys comfort and security.40 Central to this exposed community is the mother figure, prominent in the opening passage in the first volume of the series: And as Our Lord had intended humankind to live everywhere on earth, people came to settle in fertile areas, make their way to barren lands, fight for their survival on increasingly meagre hummocks, jump between the tussocks in bottomless bogs, and build a hut in the uttermost part of the snow. And the Lamb was the seal. The Lamb, the eternal proof that Our Lord wanted the man to live there, in the parish of Lillvattnet with his wife and children. See the Lamb that removes the hunger of the children and fills mother's breasts with milk and love.41 In a community for ever involved in maintaining its survival, the mother is the focal point, the natural source of a system of care and attention that reaches beyond the extended family to include the poor and the hungry. She is also at the centre of a wider concept of nature, of an environment which, for all its harshness, provides timber and fuel and fish and game, and which is treated by the early settlers with notable respect. Sara Lidman's community, in late-nineteenth century Sweden, illustrates a concept of nature which, in Carolyn Merchant's term, is organic, with nature identified with the nurturing mother.42 Against this background, Sara Lidman can be seen to trace the beginnings of that process which Carolyn Merchant has labelled 'the death of nature': the arrival of a mechanistic era when the environment, in common with woman, comes to be perceived as passive, a resource to be exploited. The shift is brought into relief by the presence in Sara Lidman's narrative of a figure recalling the hunter-gatherers, a man who eschews the regular duties of the smallholder to live with his sprawling family in abandoned huts, working when he feels like it. and tracking down food and the raw materials for tools in the forest with unfailing skill. This focusing on major cultural epochs reinforces the universality of Sara Lidman's series and also adds an element of inevitability. The central interest, however, is in the individual characters who make up the community, and more particularly in how a

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character who is embracing an organic concept of nature with all its implications can be made to switch to a mechanistic concept. The seeming inevitability of the process is juxtaposed with a search for alternatives: is there a way out, a possible development other than that which brings such devastation to this community? Significantly Didrik Martensson, the son of an established smallholder and 21 years old in 1878, the year when he becomes aware of the potential of the railway, has a notable interest in language. His vivid and powerful speech, in which he argues that the future of the community lies in the arrival of the railway rather than in the digging of endless drainage ditches, has the parish council riveted; and his subsequent relationship with the local police chief, which propels him into a world of economic expansion and political influence, has a new vocabulary as one of its cornerstones. At their first encounter, the police chief lends Didrik, along with a legal manual, a dictionary of loan-words,43 their joint meal and the surroundings having already exposed Didrik to a torrent of new objects and concepts. Didrik's ambition to improve conditions for the members of his native community is laudable, but the vocabulary he learns in the process effectively serves to obscure reality and control the people he is wanting to help — phenomena which Sara Lidman had previously explored in her play Marta Marta (1970). As Didrik makes a meteoric career, becoming first a shopkeeper and then chairman of the parish council, he is instrumental in getting the railway to Lillvattnet, providing the men and the horses, the timber and the gravel necessary for the project - but he fails to perceive the fundamental patterns of control which make him a mere pawn in an elaborate hierarchy. With the adoption of his new language he jettisons the original, life-saving interdependence, leaving it for the narrative to cultivate and celebrate. On closer inspection, however, the pointers towards the new era of mechanisation and hierarchical control have been present in the community of smallholders and, indeed, in Didrik's own family. In a setting where the labour-consuming drainage ditches emerge as an initial means of controlling nature, the treatment of the poor and the hungry can add unobtrusive patterns of inequality and exploitation. Nabot, taken on as a helper by Didrik's father, illustrates this pattern; but when his failure to lift a heavy stone from

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the ditch he is digging attracts the scorn of the other male members of the family, the narrative, significantly, takes a different line. The technique of the omniscient narrator of terminating would-be statements in question-marks reduces the level of omniscience and maintains an underlying respect for a character like Nabot.44 But the most important examples of exploitation are connected with Anna-Stava, who becomes Didrik's beloved in the first volume and his bride towards the end of the second. Anna-Stava's specialness has been cultivated by her family: confined, unlike other women in the community, to indoor duties and intended not to become the wife of an ordinary smallholder,45 she develops into a measure of the social progress of her family and, to her husband, an embodiment of a new feminine ideal reinforced by the examples of his superiors. It is no accident that it is Didrik's wife who emerges as the epitome of the spoilt and passive wife, of a piece with the exploitation of the environment that her husband initiates and promotes. But Anna-Stava's status is not possible without the extensive support of others, and here the narrative develops a tangible symbolism which, again, takes us beyond the exploitative patterns of the story into a realm of different loyalties. Anna-Stava has once — in a dream? in a vision? - seen Nabot's father, the outcast called Hard, being trodden into a bog by Didrik's horse. The horse has survived and Anna-Stava has not revealed what she has seen; but when the bog is drained in preparation for the building of the railway station, twelve horse skulls and one human skull are discovered, the latter eventually finding its way to Anna-Stava who takes to carrying it with her, hidden in her clothing. Her guilt fuels a sense of affinity, all the more striking in terms of a story that steadily widens the social gap between the outcast and the most affluent woman in the community. At the same time, however, this affinity is consistently celebrated by a narrative highlighting an existential relationship in increasingly poetic terms. No less suggestively, the text foregrounds the role of dependence and exploitation in terms of a differing concept of woman. Named after the biblical servant woman driven out into the desert, Hagar is first encountered by Didrik in the household of the local police chief, whose treatment of her signals her status as a woman perceived to be generally available. As she moves around the area

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with her son, she becomes the focus of men's sexual fantasies, including those of Didrik, the climax being a scene in which an entire household, supposedly devoting itself to religious pursuits, spends a Sunday indulging in thoughts about Hagar inspired by the mysterious noises emanating from her activities on the floor above. Hagar, who has simply been papering a room in Didrik's and Anna-Stava's house, pointedly brings out the couple's rise to social superiority and their concomitant dependence on an outcast like herself: when Anna-Stava has eventually given birth to a son, nearly losing her life in the process, only Hagar's milk saves the infant. Hagar refocuses the feminine centre of that interdependence which Didrik and Anna-Stava prefer to ignore or suppress. While Didrik's superiors can line their pockets with some of the remarkable savings made on the construction of the railway, Didrik himself eventually goes bankrupt, his handling of additional resources intended for the most needy in the parish rendering him a term in prison. His fate is ignominious: instead of welcoming the king at the inauguration of the railway station, Didrik is brought there in chains, on his way to prison in Stockholm 1000 kilometres to the south. In the wake of his financial crash, the community is devastated by poverty and starvation, the effects striking at the heart of his own family. In the railway series the craving for change, so prominent in Sara Lidman's earlier novels too, thus emerges in a new light. And what survives in her narrative is a sense of community capable of overcoming both distances and disasters. Perceiving anew the centrality of his relationship with Anna-Stava, Didrik evolves during his nine-month sentence a sensibility that enables him to be present — in a dream? in a vision? — at the auction where his property is sold and his assets are scattered. Most importantly, this sense of community is developed in poetic terms, with the feathers and down that Didrik is set to prepare for pillows and duvets linking him with the grouse that Anna-Stava traps in an attempt to ensure the family's survival. The literary text, this exceptionally many-faceted weave in which dialect, biblicisms and imagery help to prize apart the vocabulary imported into Lillvattnet, becomes the prime token of the continuing role of a sense of community without which humankind, in Sara Lidman's opinion, cannot exist.

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Sara Lidman's railway series is one of several multi-volume novels written in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, the preoccupation with the past - sustained in this case by much detailed research — emerging as a reaction against an ahistoricism gaining ground in the country at a time when rapid social and economic changes were bringing about the swift obliteration of even the recent past. But Sara Lidman's series is unusual in two respects: the path along which she reached her Swedish community went via Africa and Vietnam, and the language which she evolved to depict Lillvattnet and its people has a daring richness and complexity stemming from a fusion of political commitment and artistic sensibility. The result is a demanding but exceptionally powerful work of art. Sara Lidman's avowed lack of interest in feminism46 clearly has to be seen in the context of the consistent testing of femininity and its potential in her novels. The growing predominance of female characters in her texts culminates in the railway series, whose social ideals and environmental concerns are strikingly reminiscent of those of Elin Wagner, and whose narrative attitude demonstrates both the ethical consistency and impressive artistic maturation of Sara Lidman's talent.

11

Kerstin Ekman (bom 1933) LIFE AND TEXT

Kerstin Ekman's published work spans a remarkable range of genres. Having emerged in the early 1960s as a successful writer of thrillers, she established herself in the 1970s as an author of feminist fiction with an emphasis on social history. But the last volume in her series about the roles of women and their work in a Swedish community developing from a railway halt into a fully fledged town took the form of a first-person novel exploring identity and narrative, and Kerstin Ekman's output throughout the 1980s continued this unsettling trend, consisting as it did of a story of a dog, a novel about a troll who lives to be 500 years old — and a study of inaugural speeches made by members of the Swedish Academy. In 1990 she investigated feminine identity in the form of a verse narrative, and her latest novel draws on the plot of a thriller to explore the relationship between nature and culture.1 The citations for the numerous literary prizes won by Kerstin Ekman point to a persistent desire to pigeonhole her work: thrillers, social realism and so on. The most recent histories of Swedish literature place her squarely in the category of women writers, which is treated as marginal in both works.2 Kerstin Ekman, however, has consistently resisted all attempts at categorising her writing. The creative gifts which have helped to fuel Kerstin Ekman's marked resistance to conformity emerged while she was still a child. Born in 1933 in Risinge in the province of Ostergotland, she developed an early interest in reading, writing and drawing. She was encouraged in her artistic pursuits by her father, of whom she has spoken with great fondness and admiration.3 Having grown up in the small railway, town of Katrineholm, she left for the University of Uppsala in 1952, completed her degree five years later and published her first book in 1959. By

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then she was working with film and then went on to teach at a folk high school before becoming a full-time writer. She subsequently left Uppsala for Harnosand, and since the late 1970s she has been living in Valsjobyn, a small community in Jamtland, close to the Norwegian border. Kerstin Ekman has repeatedly expressed her faith in the power of narrative. Writing in 1975 about the early impact on her understanding of literature by the work of the English novelist William Locke, whose books she had found on her father's shelves, she commented that Locke's sense of novelistic form taught her that 'Life has one central character, one beginning, one climax and one ending. It acquires its meaning when told to someone'.4 And to Kerstin Ekman it is essential that the author preserves his or her freedom, aware of the extent to which the individual in the late twentieth century is affected by society and the media.5 As a writer, Kerstin Ekman has said, 'you have to work with that which is a potential within you in order to be able to proceed in the direction of the tangent'.6 Her preoccupation with artistic freedom has also been expressed in more concrete terms. When Ayatollah Khomenei imposed the death sentence on Salman Rushdie for his The Satanic Verses in 1989, she argued that the Swedish Academy, to which she had belonged since 1978, should make a statement expressing its support of Salman Rushdie and its condemnation of the death sentence. When the Academy declined, Kerstin Ekman and two of her colleagues decided to leave, sparking off a major controversy. Kerstin Ekman's pronouncements on artistic freedom can be seen as reinforcing in explicit terms the remarkable variety with regard to style and genre which is so characteristic of her oeuvre. But when she talks of the novel as being polyphonic, as speaking with many voices,7 this can also be taken as a pointer towards the role of the many writers whose influence on her work she has acknowledged. These include Thomas Mann and John Galsworthy as well as Selma Lagerlof, Victoria Benedictsson and Birgitta Trotzig.8 Interestingly, the two writers to whom she has referred most frequently both preceded her in Chair No. 15 in the Swedish Academy: Elin Wagner has been praised by Kerstin Ekman for her distinctive narrative voice and for her commitment based on factual understanding,9 while Harry Martinson has impressed her by his

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ecological prescience and his insight into humankind's relationship with nature.10 THE RANGE OF EARLY WORKS

Three decades or so after the publication of her thrillers, Kerstin Ekman spoke with some contempt of how she had succeeded in relying on virtually all the cliches of the genre.11 Her thrillers have titles such as 30 meter mord (Thirty Metres of Murder, 1959), Han ror pa sig (He Is Alive, 1960) and De tre smd mdstarna (The Three Little Masters, 1961) and convey a sense of almost artificial restraint, which renders the texts strangely impersonal. But The Three Little Masters, which was awarded a thriller prize, represents a development in that it has a distinctive setting, in the far north of Sweden, and characters who are convincingly observed down to their registers of language. These features are even more pronounced in Dodsklockan (The Death Knell, 1963). Again set in the north of the country, this text displays an impressive knowledge of the forest, wildlife and shooting. Pointing ahead to Kerstin Ekman's later work, the narrative draws a distinction between the outsider who arrives from the town to join the shooting party and the members who live in the area and know the forest. Most importantly, however, this thriller amounts to a rebellion against the demand that all the pieces of the plot should fall into place, with only the reader eventually learning that what has looked like a fatal accident has in fact been a murder. Kerstin Ekman's next novel, Pukehornet (The Devil's Horn, 1967), is ambiguous in terms that are at once more explicit and more refined. Regarded by the critics as a thriller that had failed, the book, in retrospect, has been described by the author as 'a kind of footbridge [. . .] put out for the reader to step on between the thrillers and the novels'.12 Part I of The Devil's Horn is a third-person narrative about a man and his landlady. When Par accompanies Agda Wallin on a visit to her sister, she collapses and dies on a lonely forest path. He returns to Agda Wallin's flat and constructs a fiction according to which she is still alive although confined to bed. In Part II of the novel, which is told in the first person, we discover that Par and Agda Wallin are characters in a narrative put together by the first-person narrator who, however, remains anonymous. As the two parts of the novel

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overlap, perspectives and versions are called into question, and the concluding reinforcement of the fiction surrounding Agda Wallin, rather than any conventional resolution, brings out the role of this text as an investigation into the very justification of narrative. Par's story in Part I can be read in Lacanian terms. With Agda Wallin having disappeared, Par constructs a fiction that revolves around her, i.e. the language that propels him into the symbolic order originates, quite emphatically, in lack. But the perspective changes once it becomes apparent that Par and his story are part of the fiction created by the first-person narrator. Having drawn up a detailed plan for her next novel,13 she abandons this to write about Par and his landlady - for we must assume that the third-person narrator of Part I is identical with the first-person narrator of Part II. In the last instance, the dual and distinctly feminine void at the centre of Par's fiction, a snow-covered space in a forest and a comfortable but empty room, points towards the narrator, but it remains a mere space around which the narrative circles. Kerstin Ekman may have said farewell to the conventional thriller, but feminine identity is still little more than a hidden potential in this text. Her next novel, Menedarna (The Perjurers, 1970), explores the inconclusiveness found in The Devil's Horn in more radical terms. Here the central character is the Swedish-born left-wing activist Joe Hill, executed in the United States in 1919. As Kerstin Ekman has pointed out, the lack of documentary evidence means that the truth about Joe Hill is likely to remain unknown;14 in this novel, moreover, the focaliser is a marginal figure who, for all his sympathies for International Workers of the World, knows little about Joe Hill and never succeeds in getting close to him. The Perjurers is an interesting example of Kerstin Ekman's preoccupation with the problem of identity, but it remains an abstract exercise. Far more rewarding is Marker och bldbdrsris (Darkness and Bilberry Sprigs), the novel which Kerstin Ekman published in 1972. Here the problem of identity is treated in comparatively concrete socio-economic terms. The novel draws its strength from the handling of the setting, a small community in the north of Sweden, and the delineation of a handful of characters with a couple of women in the foreground. The situation of Helga is conventional enough: a housewife who has been widowed in early

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middle age, she has established a relationship with another man, but the scarcity of employment means that he spends most of his time away from her. Helga's loneliness and boredom are reinforced by the harsh climate: The mercury crept down to —23°C. No car came up the hill, no human being on a kick-sled, nothing. The boring afternoon descended, the blue light came and the cold got more intense. Every flame of life outside was turned down. Helga sat wondering where the dipper was or the redpoll. Little Helga beneath the big empty sky, she was more frightened of the afternoon than she was of night and darkness.15 Helga's step-daughter Asa adds a different but scarcely more positive perspective on the situation of women in Sweden in the early 1970s. A single mother who has had to give up her job in the capital after losing her child-minder, she has had to return to her native community with its "woeful lack of opportunities. Helga, Asa, Helga's partner and several of the other characters in this novel struggle with types of pressure and loneliness imposed on them by the economic system. This system is capitalist and ruthlessly efficient, its methods for the mass production of chickens and pigs pointing up the significance of the social values shared by the small community. When the members of this community decide to distil their own aquavit, they can be seen as initiating a far-reaching rebellion against the system. Deviousness, expertise and excitement now weld them more closely together, and the subsequent midsummer celebrations unleash emotional, irrational dimensions which suggestively undermine the prevailing system. In the last instance, this is a novel about human dignity, its foregrounding of women characters pointing ahead to Kerstin Ekman's tetralogy (1974-83), and its focus on a sparsely populated area linking it to Handelser vid vatten (Black-water), published in 1993. THE TETRALOGY

Kerstin Ekman's series of four novels, Hdxringarna (Magic Circles, 1974), Springkdllan (The Spring, 1976), Anglahuset (House of Angels, 1979), and En stad av ljus (A City of Light, 1983) constitutes her most ambitious work to date. Spanning the century from the

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1870s to the 1970s and set in a town that owes its existence to the coming of the railway, the tetralogy offers a wide-ranging study of the emergence of modern Sweden. The poor agricultural community is transformed by housing and industry, but for many decades this continues to be a deeply class-ridden society, with the railway station retaining its royal dining-room while the working class remains underfed and badly housed. The construction of the Social Democratic 'home of the people' from the 1930s onwards relieves the physical suffering; but in the world of the 1970s depicted in the final volume, capitalist exploitation is, if anything, more extensive, and the alienated, rootless individual a more pliable victim. Writing in 1981 about the problems faced by Swedish women novelists more than a century earlier, Kerstin Ekman emphasised the fact that they had to construct the models of their worlds within the model of the male universe: 'Their women's worlds constituted the reverse, the inside of "real" life. To make the inside real was no swift operation. As a matter of fact, it is still in progress'.16 Significantly, women's work is central to Kerstin Ekman's four novels. Being reproductive work, it reinforces the cyclical patterns which determine the lives of women. It is no accident that Frida, a middle-aged washer-woman, realises that she is pregnant while she is busy with the week-long washing in an upper-class household, tackling handkerchiefs, underpants and the rest of the household linen which she knows will require the same treatment again in four months' time. The dirty washing is soaked, laboriously rubbed on washing-boards and then boiled in a steaming hot wash-house, rinsed and taken to a lakeside for further rinsing in ice-cold water, hung to dry out of doors, and finally folded and mangled for smoothness. It is work that leaves Frida's body marked and exhausted and fails to alleviate her worries about how to provide for her family with work being scarce and her husband having gone away in search of a job. Similar worries haunt Tora, widowed with two young children, who starts making bread during the night to sell at the market. The account of her first night spent baking, at the end of Magic Circles, brings out both her skills and her fears as she prepares a dough far bigger than anything she has handled before, worries that it may not rise in the draughty basement where she is working, attends to her children in the

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midst of her baking, and finally permits herself to acknowledge the tiredness of her body as she surveys the gleaming brown loaves. As Sarah Death has pointed out with special reference to House of Angels, women's cyclical time leaves its marks on women's bodies both 'in the form of the scars of childbirth and the crookedness resulting from repetitive labour'.17 But when Sara Sabina, Tora's grandmother, lies dying in Magic Circles, we are told nothing about the marks left on the body of this old woman although we know that there has been no work 'so rough, so filthy or so messy'18 that she has not taken it on: it is as if the narrative had not yet reached this kind of intimacy. Tora, however, surrounds her dying grandmother with cleanliness, devoting much of the final week of Sara Sabina's life to cleaning her small house inside and out. Tora's act of love acknowledges the dignity of the old woman, counteracting the inscription on her gravestone: Here lies Soldier No. 27 from Skebo District Johannes Lans *Born July 29, 1833 |Died June 12, 1902 and his wife 19 A couple of decades later, a parallel yet contrasting account of women's work in The Spring depicts Frida's daughter Dagmar making a dress for her mother. Here Frida's worn and distorted body is the focal point, measured and scrutinised as Dagmar makes her mother try on her work and alters the model to fit Frida's lopsided shoulder and disguise her big, swollen hands. As a result of Dagmar's attention to the neck insertion with its rows of lace, the corded pleats, the worked loops on the sleeve openings and countless other details, the dress transports Frida from her invisibility as a washer-woman into a sphere where she can be seen and, indeed, see herself: Then Dagmar saw that the blue-grey wool brought out the colour of her eyes. She had never thought of her mother as having any particular eye colour before, but so it was. She had blue-grey eyes and her body was little and her hair was silky. Beneath the soft waves her face looked smaller than it usually did. When Frida saw herself in the big, full-length mirror she

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didn't say: I just get older and wretcheder. She said nothing at all and she looked almost embarrassed.20 In this tetralogy, women's cyclical time is contrasted with the linearity of male time; and, as Sarah Death has emphasised, the antithesis points up an extensive critique of society: Ekman's male time is 'tempo', a hectic, artificial, externally imposed time which attempts to structure life and order society. It is the time of factory whistles, referees' whistles, military commands and committee meeting schedules. Above all it is train-timetable time, the railway representing the march of progress and men's desire to tame nature.21 The town that develops throughout these four novels is a male construct, determined by landowners, industrialists and merchants who are eager to have their portraits painted and their busts erected, and who have no qualms about modelling the new post office building on the House of Nobility in Stockholm.22 The narrative disrespectfully penetrates their sense of self-importance and shows up a fragility of the male ego which is traced, with relentless irony, throughout the tetralogy. This is Arne Johansson in House of Angels, on leave from guarding Sweden's borders during the Second World War, returning home to find that his wife is having a night out: This is what coming home is like: the bed empty, a dance at the Town Hotel, and an air of chill and desertion in the kitchen. [. . .] in here, after all, he has always been the master, he for whose sake herrings have been soaked and cabbage parboiled, the master of the room, the kitchen and the hall and over her loins concealed in ribbed cotton stockinet bloomers. What was to be stuffed into them had been decided by him. What was to go out of them had depended on him.23 The narrative's disrespectful treatment of conventional male achievements fuels a critique of society which, in House of Angels, set in the 1930s and 1940s, also incorporates war. The preoccupations of men have lost all connections with the work of women. It is essential, Kerstin Ekman pointed out in an interview after the publication of House of Angels, 'for us to devote ourselves to

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things earthly. Cultivate a garden, cook, take care, watch that which is alive grow and develop. [...] It is essential, not least for our overall view of the world'.24 The Swedish critic Anna Williams, discussing women's work and development in these novels, has discerned a Utopian vision, the 'thought of the possibility of feeling joy in work and of work and life as an indissoluble and fruitful whole'.25 It seems to me, however, that the vision of a synthesis does not point in a practical direction: the power and significance of the cyclical patterns bound up with women's reproductive work are demonstrated, first and foremost, at the level of narrative, in terms of themes, motifs, language and narrative structure. In their full range, then, the cyclical patterns do not simply reinforce the social critique: permeating these texts and becoming increasingly conspicuous, they have the effect of turning upside-down any conventional notions of citizens and their society by opening up for alternative, multi-dimensional worlds. In Magic Circles, where ancient traditions are still apparent, Sara Sabina's husband tells stories which begin with formulas such as 'It was in the morning of Easter Day when the sun was dancing', or 'this happened two days before midsummer night when the fern flowers'.26 The natural world is significant and mysterious. In particular, the world of wild animals suggests dimensions beyond those of everyday life. On a visit to her ageing grandparents, Tora listens to them stealing up one June night to look for the stoat that sometimes plays outside the house: 'What did they think they would find? An order that was not that of humankind? But it was out of one's reach, always. One looked for it with eyes turned shallow from lack'.27 In The Spring, it is the motif of water that reinforces the cyclical pattern, the motif also reflected in the narrative structure with its flow of shorter sections rather than distinctive chapters as in the previous novel. Frida the washer-woman wants to know where the water she now gets out of a tap actually comes from, only to have her son, Konrad, tell her of the underground landscape where water predominates.28 Konrad preserves an affinity with the alternative worlds, confirmed by his rediscovery of the ancient well at Himmelso and reflected in his capacity as a storyteller. He has told his younger sister, Ingrid, of the hidden landscape of water which mirrors that of the earth, explaining too that there are 'people whose lives were reversed and reflected images of

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everyone else's' and claiming that they have 'powers which no one had tested yet'.29 House of Angels opens with a conversation between a lime tree on a street corner and an old building made of wood. In the middle of the bustling town, the lime tree retains its awareness of the forest, and the wood in the building retains a link with the living tree.30 Here the alternative worlds live on in the gardens that blossom between buildings, unseen from the street.31 House of Angels is remarkable for its juxtaposition of many different types of text, with sections such as Tora's nightmare of the floor of her sitting-room collapsing,32 Frida's vision of light in the forest one winter's afternoon,33 and Ingrid's letter to her unborn daughter,34 strikingly confirming feminine identities; indeed, apart from isolated sentences, Ingrid's letter is the first text written by a woman which we are allowed to share in this series. Most importantly, the novel's differing texts open up poetic dimensions that render everyday life in this town flat and even marginal. A City of Light, the concluding volume in the tetralogy, presents a closely observed 1970s world with teenage culture, environmental concerns, and a Swedish clothing industry that has expanded to Portugal. But here the socio-realism has given way to investigations into identity. Ann-Marie, who first appeared towards the end of House of Angels, returns from Portugal to sell the house in which she has grown up; when she realises that her teenage daughter Elisabeth has disappeared, the wait for her gives a new dimension to her project in Sweden. But the house, located in the same town in which the previous books in the series have been set, and the focus on Ann-Marie's childhood and adolescence, also becomes the framework of a far-reaching enquiry into identity. Coupled with this is an investigation into the multitude of worlds which has been part of Ann-Marie's life, and which becomes a more general investigation into the construction and significance of alternative worlds. In the previous volumes in the tetralogy, Kerstin Ekman has written about people involved in building a town. Using words, she has in turn constructed the characters and their changing environment. The final volume, unlike its predecessors, is narrated not in the third person but in the first and with Ann-Marie as the fictitious author. It can be seen as a metatext, a study of

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the problems pertaining to the construction of identity and of distinctive worlds. As Rochelle Wright has pointed out in an important article, it is difficult to ignore the link between the project of the previous volumes and a comment such as the following one, made by Ann-Marie as she surveys her situation towards the end of the novel: 'For each world I build, another one arises, just as plausible or implausible. [. . .] And when I made the city of iron and gravel and rubbish another one arose - a city oflight'.35 Ann-Marie depicts unhappy years at school, two terms at Uppsala University, work on the local paper, marriage and a move to Portugal. And it is not just on the immediate level that her life is spent in contrasting worlds. With her mother having left the family — her daughter has been led to believe that she has died — Ann-Marie mostly lives with Jenny and Fredrik. They have built their own practical house and their existence is deeply conventional, hemmed in by rationality, anxious planning, and lack of imagination. Ann-Marie's sense of alienation in this world is to some extent compensated for by the world opened up for her by her father. Henning is an inventor who assumes the proportions of a magician as he introduces Ann-Marie to the role of the laws of mathematics and to the notion of a coherent universe where it is up to humankind to unveil and exploit the hidden patterns. The world of Henning and the relationship between father and daughter predominate in Ann-Marie's narrative, culminating in the excitement of their intellectual games.36 But their world is not devoid of conflict: while Henning is proud of the society being built around them, Ann-Marie is appalled by its ugliness;37 and with the new discoveries in the field of physics, including Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Henning's world begins to disintegrate. However, it has provided Ann-Marie with decisive impulses. The most remarkable and most poetic world in the novel is a product of Ann-Marie's mind, ruled by the goddess Ishnol: I was in the surging leaves, in the tall crowns of the trees — I stepped in and sank. The acidic warm wind went through me and the world, through the lung of leaves that was breathing me and filling my veins with light. The tips of the lung, the tongue

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of sunshine were licking me as I rose and sank in the embrace of the leaves and their membranes opened themselves for my body and opened it so that I was streaming out into the tips and met the light that was pulsating me. Then I slowly flowed back into the veins of the leaves and sank. Slowly Ishnol lowered me with her gaze.38 The pleasurable harmony of the world controlled by Ishnol reinforces Ann-Marie's loathing of the everyday world, and especially of bodily needs and functions. Her task, to create a receptive climate for the superior knowledge of Ishnol's world by constructing complex alphabets, has a parallel, as has been noted, in her subsequent act of narration.39 While Rochelle Wright has read Ann-Marie's Ishnol world as the product of early 'psychotic breaks',40 Maria Schottenius in her book on A City of Light has followed a Jungian line, equalling Ishnol with Ishtar and finally defining Ann-Marie as no other than the Great Mother.41 But although the mythical allusions are undoubtedly present, I think their significance rests in their character of fragments, of mere possibilities. It is important that Ann-Marie never narrates herself as a coherent, unified being. With Synnove, her successful contemporary, as a foil, Ann-Marie — who did not complete her academic studies, did not achieve a career and did not embrace motherhood — emerges in the contexts of Ana Maria, her Portuguese namesake, and of Ann-Sofie, her Swedish neighbour of dubious reputation. In contrast to Ann-Marie's sterile restraint, the love of these women, for better or worse, knows no limits: Ann-Marie finds Ana Maria, the biological mother of the adopted Elisabeth, having an affair with her husband;42 and when Ann-Sofie lies dying in hospital, Ann-Marie herself attends to one of her customers.43 But the fact that Ann-Marie accepts or even temporarily identifies with these women whose names are so similar to her own does not mean to say that she somehow subsumes them and is unified as a result. It is true that Ann-Marie eventually achieves some kind of harmony, an existence where the world of Ishnol belongs to that of dreams, but this is purely the result of her having narrated what becomes the text of this novel, thus achieving some perspective on herself along with personal honesty. The unsettled and unsettling

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nature of her narrative underlines the continuing lack of harmony: the long central section with the memories of her life, not always told in chronological order, is simply headed 'Berattelserna' ('The Stories'), while the opening section about her arrival, 'Huset' ('The House'), has its stability undermined by the concluding section, 'Katten' ('The Cat'), as both headings refer to a tale-and-drawing presented to young Ann-Marie in which a house turns into a cat.44 Whatever stability can be found is no more than relative, and it is the product of the narrative itself. Ann-Marie is no more than the product of her own writing: I am alone with the paper, the tip of the pen, the ink. I change myself. I alter with every word. An alphabet creeps out of me, it is moving across the page like tiny creatures on the bottom of a river. I creep out of an alphabet; I'm merely movements, reflections on a sandy bottom, I am the movements of the water and the flashes of light. The tip of the pen writes me.45 Kerstin Ekman's increasingly explicit preoccupation throughout the tetralogy - and indeed prior to this series — with identity and narrative can be seen to culminate in the sophisticated texts of this novel. But A City of Light also points ahead, focusing on an interrelationship between nature and culture which Kerstin Ekman's next two books continue to explore. NATURE AND CULTURE

Hunden (The Dog, 1986) could be described as a novella. It is the story of a puppy getting lost in a wintry forest and surviving, against the odds, until he is identified by his one-time master more than six months later. By then the dog is a wild animal, and the lengthy process of taming him brings to a climax the text's examination of the complex borderline between nature and culture. The overall perspective is that of the dog with all the limitations this entails: the landscape through which he is moving emerges only piecemeal, and the bigger animals remain anonymous threats, reduced to scents, movements, and fur in grey or gold. Kerstin Ekman has emphasised the stylistic significance of the text: 'of course you cannot write from inside a dog who has not got any words, but I wanted to try to describe experiences pertaining to the senses without symbols and similes'.46 The dog's angle has been

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developed with remarkable skill, resulting in a portrayal of nature denuded of all romanticism but with beauty emerging through the very precision of the narrative. Rjbvarna i Skuleskogen (The Robbers of Skule Forest), Kerstin Ekman's 1988 novel, is a hugely ambitious and impressive poststructuralist project which to some extent follows on from the feminism of the tetralogy, but the book also has obvious links with The Dog. The central character, Skord, would seem to draw his name from a combination of the Swedish words for 'forest' and 'word', skog and ord.47 He is a troll from the forest who learns to function in the world of human beings, and the narrative traces his life in this world from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. With great insight Kerstin Ekman depicts the lives of beggars in medieval Sweden, alchemy in Uppsala, a fragment of the Thirty Years' War followed by prison life in Finland, treasure hunting in northern Sweden, nineteenth-century magnetism and much else, displaying also a stylistic skill that makes this vast chronological span effective and convincing. Most importantly Skord, who initially knows no human language and who has got 'nothing more beneath his tuft of hair than a fluttering similar to that of the wings of the Siberian jay'48, provides a consistent outsider's perspective of culture. Always a troll but for part of his long life well established in society and even successful on its terms, Skord is an extreme example of Kerstin Ekman's preoccupation with the problem of identity. The famulus of a priest, the assistant of an alchemist, a barber-surgeon in the Thirty Years' War, a scholar, a doctor and so on, Skord repeatedly changes his identity, sometimes also transcending gender boundaries in terms that have inspired comparisons with Virginia Woolf s Orlando.49 But the troll of the forest remains central, with Skord retaining his ability to communicate with animals and to leave his body at will and soar in the shape of a bird of prey. He embodies those other, alternative dimensions which, in Kerstin Ekman's tetralogy discussed above, become increasingly submerged as society develops. Skord comes from Skule Forest and repeatedly returns to this wilderness, notorious for its robbers whom he also joins on more than one occasion. Existing as they do in the depths of the forest and emerging only to steal and plunder, rape and murder, the robbers unambiguously undermine culture and society. Their

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work can be seen to be vastly enlarged in the horrific scenes from the Thirty Years' War. But this text can also convey a sense of mystery and beauty, assisted by Skord's growing perceptiveness and experience of the world of humankind. One of Skord's major discoveries concerns the significance of images. The stories and the play of a medieval beggar girl alert him to the role of representation: while human beings 'had many images of the world and these images were full of meaning', the inhabitants of the forest find themselves living 'in a green chaos, in black holes in the bogs, in rustling leafy tree-tops, in holes and crevices, in moss giving way underfoot and in unsteady heaps of brushwood'.50 The Robbers of Skule Forest continues and expands Kerstin Ekman's preoccupation with the significance of narrative in terms that are both striking and original. For not only is Skord learning human languages from scratch. He also realises that women had 'a way of writing which they did with a thread inserted through the eye of a sharp needle', and that the woman who was once a beggar girl, using these implements, is able to write the flowers of the meadow. Importantly, however, she 'did not -write them as they -were growing there, not so that you could have taken them from the piece of linen and put them back into the sward, but she made signs for them'.51 As in A City of Light, narrative is transient yet crucial. The pieces of linen embroidered with flowers gradually become rags for cleaning cows' udders and the stitches inexorably disappear: 'She might just as well have written in water'.52 Yet Skord has seen and interpreted the signs. And what would the robber called Baldesjor have been without his tales of adventures abroad and of perfect love? 'A gruff voice, a hand that thrust with a spear and stabbed with a dagger. Ear ache, endless peeing, a bundle of hungrily rumbling guts'.53 The Robbers of Skule Forest, however, focuses more emphatically than the previous novel on the relativity of language, and highlights again and again the gap between signifier and signified. Central here is the tarot which is given to Skord by an old woman living with the robbers. As Maria Schottenius has pointed out, pictures from the tarot are reflected in the narrative, with the tarot seemingly also having provided the overall structure of the novel.54 But more important, I believe, is the gap between the tarot image and the reality of the text. Having been hung up

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by one foot in a tree,55 Skord may remind us of The Hanged Man of the tarot; but the two are not identical, and the differences help to open up for some of those dimensions which the familiarity of the tarot picture may conceal. In a beautiful section towards the end of the novel, Skord is confronted with his own difference in the character of Xenia, 'the strange woman' who has spent twelve years of her life with the trolls, and who embodies the lack of order and the absence of chronological time which this text consistently locates in the forest. Interestingly, Xenia learns about the human concept of time by reading novels: 'The books had provided her with a model for envisaging life. One thing came first, then the other —just as in a novel'.56 The love between Xenia and Skord constitutes a moment of harmony in this consistently unsettling text where culture is at once celebrated and radically called into question, and where the alternative dimensions so strikingly assume centre stage. LATER WORKS

Knivkastarens kvinna (The Knife-Thrower's Woman) is a very different kind of text. Dated 1984, it was published in 1990 and is a first-person verse narrative, with some sections in prose, of a woman's experiences of an operation to remove an ectopic pregnancy, a further operation to remove her womb and ovaries, a breakdown and a spell in a mental hospital, during which she also separates from her partner, a suicide attempt, and the beginnings of recovery. The series of profound crises makes the issue of identity central and concrete. And the issue is emphatically gendered, from the description of the surgeon: The big Dog has peed. He has scrubbed his paws and approaches calmly. The knives are on the tray. He will open you up and take life out of you.57 to the references to the narrator's partner as a he-ass in rut: He has ridden your back so hard, he has filled your cavern with his frenzy

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The linen cupboard of a hospital ward, filled with the scent of clean sheets, of textiles, becomes the physical focus of a recovery assisted by books, paper, paint-brushes and paint. The narrator's creative urge points to the text itself, which restates the issue of identity through a wealth of allusions and quotations, ranging from modern Swedish literature via medieval ballads to the Song of Solomon and the Babylonian epic of the goddess Inanna.59 Again, the identification of the narrator with the goddess who descended to the realm of the dead and subsequently returned to the living is suggested rather than absolute, the mythical sub-stratum part of the complex intertextuality fuelling this powerful text; but in the last analysis, this identification is confirmed by the concluding celebration of nature, with harmonious rhythms helping to focus the miracle of green leaves, healing waters, and new life. Kerstin Ekman's latest novel, Hdndelser vid vatten (Events by Water, 1993), has been hugely successful and has rendered her several literary awards, including the Nordic Council Literature Prize for 1993. It is also the first work by Kerstin Ekman to have been translated into English: entitled Blackwater, the translation appeared in 1995. Blackwater takes us into contemporary Swedish society, but into a sparsely populated border area in the north. Depicting the environment with great precision, the third-person narrator highlights both its contradictions and its changeability. With its abundance of brightly coloured flowers, its greenery and its lakes, this area by the mountains can be attractive in summer, but Annie, the central character, also finds it frightening: A stony mountain rose behind the pasture, a perpendicular precipice down towards the belt of birches collapsing into a rectangular pattern. The meaningless straight lines and angles frightened her. In the other direction, the pasture land was encircled by blue-black mountains with irregular white patches, unmoving and distant to the north, west and south.60 Exposed as it is to the onslaughts of rain and snow and permeated by rivers and streams, this landscape is also in a state of perpetual

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change. This is a world of relentless processes where landmarks disappear and the traces of human work and habitation are quickly obliterated: 'The water kept bubbling under the ground, seeping through it and flowing over it in the spring light, dissolving everything made by human beings'.61 The characters have to cope not only with the dark and cold of the long winters but also with the problem of survival in a remote area. Speaking of Blackwater, Kerstin Ekman has emphasised the extent to which decay and impoverishment in the countryside have been overlooked in Sweden: 'What I have done in this book is [. . .] to shift the focus out to the fringe, to a mountain world where the vulnerability of the landscape and the people is still distinguishable'.62 Problems of loneliness and unemployment are conspicuous in Kerstin Ekman's novel, making moments of love and fulfilment stand out all the more miraculously. At one level, interestingly, Blackwater is a thriller. Annie, a school-teacher, catches sight of her daughter together with a man. She is reminded of events eighteen years previously, when she saw a young man running in the forest and connected him with the horrific double murder she discovered shortly afterwards: two campers had been stabbed to death in their tent pitched by a rushing stream. The murders, according the Kerstin Ekman, can be interpreted as a 'symbol of the situation of humankind today': 'To be murdered in a tent, where only the thin cloth offers protection against the outside world, is like a fable of fear and violence and exposedness in our time'.63 The murders have remain unresolved, the riddle attracting tourists to the community and spawning numerous private versions of the crime and those involved. The narrative pitches the layers of uncertainty against the search for hard facts by the police, the genre of the thriller inevitably also inviting the reader to construct interpretations which, invariably, turn out to be wrong. In Blackwater, then, the relationship between narrative and identity is given a new twist and urgency. During the eighteen years separating the murders and their solution, the different versions of the events shape and change lives, with individual characters weaving stories that become integral to their selves. Thus Annie is convinced that the young man she saw in the forest was the murderer, and her fear makes her take to sleeping

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with a shotgun by her bed. The subject of another version to the same effect, the young man is made to move away from his family and across the border to Norway. His early encounter with a woman from Finland adds a further dimension to the issue of narrative and identity: having claimed, initially, the identity of a literary character, this woman has related the young man and herself to an elaborate mythical pattern only to reveal, eventually, the entire pattern as a construct. Meanwhile the murderer has been presenting his version of events successfully enough to remain an active member of the community and become Annie's odd job man. These characters are shaped by memories, stories, interpretations, material that is subjective and markedly short-lived. Kerstin Ekman has referred to the notion of oblivion, something 'consuming us from behind', as a thought 'more horrid than death'.64 Memory is fundamental to narrative in this novel, the text not only highlighting the strata of subjectivity and unreliability involved but also showing up the role of memory and narrative for the survival of culture. Annie's schoolchildren are told about a young couple who have frozen to death because they had never been told how to light a fire in a traditional cast-iron stove. The class is inspired to embark on a project that develops into a critique of the official syllabus and an investigation into culture and the requirements for its survival. Annie labels the project 'The Paths of Memory', and to some extent the phrase can be applied to the novel too, with its division into two sections starting at the same point in time and incorporating numerous analepses often resulting in the coverage of the same ground more than once, albeit from very different perspectives. In Blackwater, then, the post-structuralist investigation of culture from The Robbers of Skule Forest has been transposed into a contemporary setting and given new and urgent dimensions. But the up-to-date setting can also be seen to have changed the relationship between nature and culture. Speaking of her home district by the Norwegian border, Kerstin Ekman has pointed out that while the forest 'was once a great memory which people who lived here had in common', the forest now planted in the felling areas will never function in the same way.65 In Blackwater the forest is the focus of ecological interest, a resource to be ruthlessly exploited

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and much else, but the forest as a site of alternatives, as in the first volume of the tetralogy or in The Robbers of Skule Forest, has clearly disappeared. Yet the need for alternatives is obvious, from the experiences of some of the characters and from the text as such; and perhaps the widespread interest in the novel and its tantalising setting can be seen as a pointer to our continuing need for dimensions beyond the rational ones. The book is, at least for the time being, a fitting climax to an oeuvre that is not only in a state of constant and exciting innovation but that has also been triumphant in its precise accounts of 'reality' as well as its suggestions of the many-faceted mysteries of existence.

12 Experimentation and Innovation While the direct impact of second-wave feminism on Swedish literature was relatively limited, certainly in comparison with its effects in Denmark and Norway, a different situation is revealed over time. However, when women writers have become prominent in Swedish literature in the 1980s and the 1990s, their preoccupations have tended to be not so much strictly feminist as more generally postmodernist, although a strong awareness of gender and gender issues has remained fundamental. The work of the writers I have chosen to present here spans a considerable chronological range, with Sonja Akesson publishing her first book of poetry in 1957, Agneta Pleijel her first drama (co-written with another author) in 1970, and Mare Kandre her first book in 1984. The many different genres are characteristic, as is the fact that none of these authors restrict themselves to a single genre. And viewed from the mid-1990s, what stands out is the ceaseless textual experimentation of all three writers. SONJA AKESSON (1926-1977)

Sonja Akesson's fifth volume of poetry, Ute skiner solen (It's Sunny Outside, 1965), concludes with a very long poem entitled 'Hur ser din farg rott ut?' ('What Does Your Color Red Look Like?'). The poem, an investigation into fundamental issues of communication, projects a lonely and desperate T whose plight is ironically enhanced by the fact that her central topic is the meaning of 'love', her analysis of its constituent parts addressed to an anonymous 'you'. The scrutiny of words and concepts, with more and more of them placed in quotation marks as the relativity of human existence becomes increasingly relentless, inevitably brings the T to the words as such: Do I 'love' the words?

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I use them to no use. Whom can I reach by words? (and what would be the difference if I could) Yet I use them.1 Sonja Akesson's texts, a significant force of innovation in midtwentieth century Swedish poetry, invariably open up perspectives on futility and death. In more immediate terms, however, communication has never posed any problems: after her breakthrough with Husfrid (Domestic Peace) in 1963 she quickly established herself as one of the most popular poets of her generation, with a number of her texts set to music and becoming well-known songs. Sonja Akesson was largely self-educated. Born in Buttle on the island of Gotland, she left school early and tried a variety of jobs. After moving to Stockholm she began to attend evening classes; a writing class on which she embarked, seemingly in the autumn of 1954, was to become particularly important.2 She also studied drama and the short story, writing texts for theatre groups, participating in the production of plays and becoming, in the 1960s, 'an activist in the predominantly left-wing culture'.3 Sonja Akesson's third marriage, to the poet and artist Jarl Hammarberg, reinforced her interest in art and in collage in particular; she and Jarl Hammarberg also wrote several works together. In all, she had five children; one son died at a young age from leukemia. Kristina Lugn, a fellow poet who has clearly been influenced by the work of Sonja Akesson, has stressed the significance of her colleague's indefatigable search for what was new.4 Sonja Akesson's interest in innovatory language and forms has resulted in prose texts as well as poetry, the two often appearing side by..side in the same collection, with the boundaries between them very difficult to draw. Thus '3x1' in the volume Jag bor i Sverige (I Live in Sweden, 1966) consists of three short monologues, the breathless flows eschewing punctuation and capitals as three women characters reveal their fears and prejudices. Most impressive are the distinctive

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registers established in no more than half a page each, complete, in the second monologue, with perfectly misplaced more bookish phrases. Sonja Akesson's desire for experimentation also found more concrete expression as in the poem 'Neeijjj' ('Nooooo') from the same collection: strategically placed after the poem 'Oron' ('Ears'), the former consists of sequences of vowels, consonants and deprecating exclamations rising to a fear-inducing crescendo of suffering and pain. In terms of purely linguistic experimentation, however, Sonja Akesson's most successful text is undoubtedly 'Aktenskapsfragan, I' ('The Marriage Question, I') from Domestic Peace (1963). The speaker is a housewife, tied to a husband who has added to her total dependence by taking financial responsibility for her child from a previous relationship. The brilliant stroke is Sonja Akesson's use of a form of'pidgin Swedish' which graphically illustrates the master—slave relationship and combines with the parallelisms and repetitions to convey the hopeless situation of the housewife: White Man make Money at Job. White Man buy Things. White Man buy wife. Wife make gravy. Wife cook crap. Wife dump dregs. Be White Man's slave. White Man think many Thoughts. Go crazy? Be White Man's slave. White Man drink skinful. Break Things? Be White Man's slave. White Man get tired of old breasts old belly White Man get tired of old wife tell her go to Hell? White Man get tired Other Man's child? Be White Man's slave.

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Come creep on knees beg be White Man's slave.5 The poem delighted the women's movement in Sweden and helped to make Sonja Akesson one of its leading writers. Part II of the poem is less well known: offering the perspective of a husband who is tied by financial commitments, the two poems together present marriage, for both parties, as a trap forged by material circumstances. Sonja Akesson's search for what was new also involved experimentation with regular metres and rhymes, elements which become increasingly prominent in her work from the 1970s. Thus Sagan om Siv (The Tale of Siv, 1974) uses the metre of the Japanese haiku throughout. 'Lilian snusar i skonan sang' ('Little Girl Sleeping Snugly in Bed') from Dodens ungar (The Babes of Death, 1973) draws on a well-known children's song to suggest a family idyll which is then found to be in tatters; and 'Aj aj aj aj' ('Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch') from Hastens oga (The Horse's Eye, 1977) uses a nursery rhyme to convey the extreme anxiety of a psychotic patient. Some of Sonja Akesson's best-known work exploiting regular metres focuses on the situation of women, '(saga)' ('[fairy tale]') from Ljuva sextital (Lovely Sixties, 1970) celebrates the struggle of a single mother employed as a crane-driver at an ironworks, the emphatic rhythm and rhymes conveying both determination and restriction as the shortcomings and prejudices of the welfare state are unveiled. 'Ska bli sjuksyster' ('Want to Be a Nurse') from The Babes of Death uses the metre of a familiar children's song to pinpoint a girl's plans for the future, her ideas oscillating between realistic notions of what nursing involves and romantic dreams inspired by women's weeklies and popular novels. 'Brudlat fran Jakobsberg (kampsang)' ('Wedding Tune from Jakobsberg [Song of struggle]') was written for a record with songs by and about women.6 The text gets to grips with conventional prejudices about women in relation to men in terms that suggest the influence of Asta Ekenvall's Manligt och kvinnligt (Masculine and Feminine, 1966), a book which Sonja Akesson had reviewed;7 and the strong rhythm and effective rhymes reinforce the urgency of the task ahead:

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Sonja Akesson's ceaseless experimentation also yielded the catalogue poem, perhaps her most characteristic poetic form. Her use of lists of parallel phrases, with subtle shifts achieving effects that are unexpected, sometimes to the point of being shocking or grotesque, was inspired by Neo-Dadaist art which enjoyed considerable attention in Sweden in the 1960s.9 While Sonja Akesson's typical catalogue poem consists of a symmetrical list with a concluding twist, her later poetry in particular provides examples of catalogue elements interspersed with more conventionally structured lines. These catalogues, developed with remarkable precision, frequently convey a profound sense of monotony, isolation and restriction. An early example is Torsamling' ('Congregation'), which lists the participants at a funeral: The minister with virtues on a cribsheet. The husband who fell short. The son who failed his A-levels. The daughter who severed all ties. The son who tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The father who believes she is an angel. The mother who believes she is asleep. The father-in-law who remembers her legs in particular. The mother-in-law who remembers all wrongs.10 What emerges here is the loneliness, in the midst of the family circle, of the woman who has died, with the author's shorthand going on to reinforce the suggestion that she has been driven to commit suicide. As developed by Sonja Akesson, the catalogue poem superbly captures the situation of many ordinary women to which she was

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so strikingly alert; but as Kristina Lugn has emphasised, Son]a Akesson's solidarity encompassed 'all those unable to cope'.11 'Samhalle' ('Society') from The Babes of Death is a list of neighbours, the initial explanations of their nicknames gradually drying up as the names are left to indicate the underlying tragedies; and 'I parken' ('In the Park') from The Horse's Eye combines adjectival phrases functioning as nouns with verbs to convey loneliness, pain and fragmentation. 'Julrakning' ('Christmas Counting') from I Live in Sweden moves off in a different direction: consisting of a housewife's list of tasks in preparation for Christmas, the opening section with food to be bought and cooked slides into the grotesque with overtones of cannibalism: Granny's yummy sausage Granny's cold pork Granny's leg of lamb Granny's festive brawn12 The concluding list, suggesting different recipients for identical Christmas presents, belongs firmly in the realm of the absurd. Closely related to the catalogue format is Sonja Akesson's use of ready-mades, with the prose and poetry in the collection Pris (Price, 1968) consisting almost entirely of material from daily papers and weeklies. The collection is crucial to Sonja Akesson's work on gender roles, with a prose text such as 'Antligen' ('At last'), made up of encounters between him and her culled from women's weeklies, amounting to a devastating expose of the power of stereotyped roles; while an untitled dialogue between 'he' and 'she' poignantly contrasts supposedly masculine material on sex and violence with supposedly feminine rosy romanticism. One of Sonja Akesson's most ambitious projects is the long poem 'Sjalvbiografi' ('Autobiography') with which Domestic Peace concludes. The opening lines have become famous: I'm leading a quiet life at 83 A Drottninggatan day after day. Wiping children's noses and polishing floors and copper pots and making mashed turnips and hashed brains.13

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Via a sequence of memories which confirms the restrictions imposed by her gender in Western society, the poem goes on to highlight the housewife's routine — the opening lines recur at intervals — and her necessarily limited ambitions, culminating in a sense of entombment complete with elements of the grotesque: I ran out into the early twilight and wanted to push my hand through the sky but hurried back home so as not to burn the potatoes. I discern a similarity between myself and potatoes. The tiniest light in the cellar and then these groping shoots. But handle with care. Keep away from frost.14 'Autobiography', however, is subtitled '(replik till Ferlinghetti)' (['reply to Ferlinghetti']), and it also turns out to be a brilliant retort to the American beat poet's text of the same title.15 Against Ferlinghetti's celebration of the power and initiative of the man, Sonja Akesson develops the role of the housewife by quoting from the American text, shifting its emphasis, turning its material upside-down, and inserting elements of her own — including sections on children and marriage. Where, for example, Ferlinghetti's man shows off his education by listing significant statues, Sonja Akesson's housewife concentrates on people she has encountered; and the American man's proud identification with Icarus is countered by the reference to the hump that the housewife has developed in the absence of wings. Sonja Akesson's is one of the most distinctive voices in Swedish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. She consistently combines exceptional powers of observation with a superbly confident and innovative use of language. Her highly original perspectives can be unsettling and painful - 'what is usually called absurd is perhaps what I perceive as most realistic', she once said16 - but they are fuelled by a delight in form and composition that make them at once aesthetically satisfying and powerfully persuasive. Her influence on new generations of writers remains profound.

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AGNETA PLEIJEL (BORN 1940)

Agneta Pleijel regards her first book of poetry, Anglar, dvargar (Angels, Dwarfs), published in 1981, as her debut proper,17 despite the fact that she had been building up a reputation as both a playwright and a critic from the late 1960s onwards. With the collection characterised by powerful imagery, much of it inspired by dreams, Agneta Pleijel has described the book as an act of emotional liberation.18 It is no accident that the powers of restriction are portrayed with such devastating emphasis: So put out your fires, those flaring for no one Dam up the fall, bridle the horse, wingclip the swan, stop the heart and give your fierce hope to me, who is dwarf19 Encapsulating a necessity that foregrounds biological determinism, the dwarf of these texts is contrasted with the princess, who insists on nourishing her hope despite the fact that it is 'small and badly watered'.20 The central conflict becomes one of soul against body rather than female against male, with the concluding sequence of poems opening up to an 'I' who is drawing sustenance from childhood memories, some of which point ahead to Agneta Pleijel's first novel, Vindspejare (He who Observeth the Wind, 1987). Agneta Pleijel has been quick to point up the connection between the central theme of Angels, Dwarfs and her own situation. While in a junior academic post at the University of Gothenburg in the 1960s she started to review literature in the press, moving to the Social Democratic Aftonbladet in Stockholm in 1968 and becoming editor of its culture section in 1975, a post which she retained until 1979. Experiencing, however, the work on reviews and criticism as 'writing to order',21 she continued to develop the playwriting on which she had embarked in the late 1960s, establishing herself, throughout the following two decades, as a significant writer of both plays and film scripts. In 1992 she was appointed to a Chair at the Institute of Drama, Stockholm. He who Observeth the Wind was published to great public acclaim and has been followed, to date, by two more novels. The left-wing commitment that characterises Agneta Pleijel's

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early "work for the theatre subsequently turned into a critique of modern Swedish society, with a particular focus on the psychological pressures experienced by its citizens. Thus her first drama, Ordning hdrskar i Berlin (Order is Prevailing in Berlin), written with Ronny Ambjornsson in 1969 and first performed in Gothenburg in 1970, offers an investigation into the collapse of the German Empire and the origins of the Weimar Republic, with special emphasis on the revolutionary potential that was quenched with the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Arguably, one of Agneta Pleijel's central themes can be discerned in the contrast between an imposed, external order and the suppressed visions of the far left; but overall, the orthodox left-wing stance now makes the play seem dated. From a technical point of view, however, it is an enterprising piece, inspired by the German cabaret tradition and the work of Bertolt Brecht. Much more rewarding is Agneta Pleijel's drama about Alexandra Kollontay, a significant figure in the Russian Revolution and subsequently Soviet Envoy and Ambassador to Sweden. Originally entitled, with a quotation from Mayakovsky, Hej Au, himlen! (Hello, Heaven!), the play was performed at the People's Theatre in Gothenburg in 1977 but was revised for the production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1979 where it was entitled Kollontaj. Technically, this is an interesting work, drawing on the bold projects of the Futurists to develop a nonsequential chronology and to highlight the alliance between art and revolution, suppressed once Stalin has assumed control. Alexandra Kollontay is portrayed as sharing both in the revolutionary fervour and in the Stalinist backlash, with Agneta Pleijel having explained how her interest in her character was fuelled by indications that Kollontay was writing, throughout her life, her own version of the Russian Revolution and the events that followed.22 The play brings into focus the split between Alexandra Kollontay's original idealism and the demands of an increasingly patriarchal and dictatorial system. Parallel tensions can be discerned in Agneta Pleijel's film script about another significant woman from Russia, the mathematician Sonja Kovalevsky, who is the subject of Berget pa mdnens baksida (The Mountain on the Far Side of the Moon), written in 1981-82. Sonja Kovalevsky was appointed to a Chair at the University of

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Stockholm in 1884, at a time when Swedish Universities were still virtually all-male bastions; and as this text illustrates, she continued to enjoy intellectual successes despite the pressures she was experiencing. But Agneta Pleijel is more concerned with Sonja Kovalevsky's emotional dimensions and her eroticism, highlighting a lack of fulfilment that cannot be acted upon or even articulated. The mathematician's close friend, the author Anne-Charlotte Leffler, provides an important foil. The play Lycko-Lisa (Lucky Lisa, 1979) is set in the future, its central female character calling economic and social developments into question. Lycko-Lisa lives in a society in which the citizens have a duty to be happy, but beneath the surface of normality and contentment there is a widespread sense of disharmony and fear as technological advances make jobs obsolete and people superfluous. Some of these issues are given more comprehensive treatment in Sommarkvdllar pa jorden (Summer Nights, 1983) and developed in psychological terms. This is not a realist play: the frequent use of monologues, the stylised characters, and the swift transitions give this work an air of expressionism. The overall structure of the play, in which music is prominent, recalls that of a musical composition. Here motifs are introduced, dropped, picked up and varied until they are brought into focus in the central conflict in which Ulrika, an actress wanting a child with her boyfriend, finds herself outdone by her niece. The result is an extensive family crisis as the various members, all successfully established in society, have to acknowledge a profound sense of disharmony. Agneta Pleijel's female characters, so often split and unfulfilled in the earlier plays, emerge here as those most capable of coping with the crisis and maturing from it. The play has also been made into a successful film, directed by Gunnel Lindblom. The novel He who Observeth the Wind is Agneta Pleijel's most ambitious work to date. It again focuses on the problem of identity but extends and deepens this historically, geographically and aesthetically. Distinctly postmodernist in its preoccupations, the text prefers to highlight and play with a series of paradoxes rather than seek any resolutions. He who Observeth the Wind depicts several generations of a family with roots in Sweden, Indonesia and Holland. The central figure is Abel, a promising young artist who leaves Stockholm and his

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fiancee in the 1890s to make his fortune in Indonesia, only to return more than three decades later with neither fortune nor artistic fame but with an Indonesian wife and several children. Planting orchards by Lake Malaren, west of Stockholm, and enhancing the landscape by means of statues and temples to the wind, the ageing Abel is 'trying to build a state of mind'.23 Abel once perceived his journey to Indonesia as an attempt at self-realisation,24 but the result has been the opposite, the old man's lack of fulfilment still discernible in his preference for painting volcanoes.25 Abel remains a paradoxical figure, the text refraining from pinpointing a rational explanation for his decision to abandon a seemingly promising future in Sweden. But the frustration and despair of the artist who fails to realise his potential permeate this text. Reinforcing this issue is a mythical pattern which is derived from the Old Testament, with the text drawing on echoes of Adam and Eve as well as Cain and Abel as it formulates the problem of the necessary rebellion of the artist, ultimately against no other than God the Father. The female character, so prominent in virtually all Agneta Pleijel's earlier work, is crucial in He who Observeth the Wind too, but implicitly rather than explicitly. She is the fictitious creator of this text — but this is a text that takes shape hesitantly, almost in spite of itself. The narrative about Abel and the narrator's account of her own visit to Indonesia in the 1970s, in the footsteps of her grandfather and in the company of her mother, are interspersed with diary-style entries which trace the complex and difficult emergence of the text. The self-reflexivity of this novel is reinforced by its apparently arbitrary structure in which the linear chronology has been replaced by a series of circular patterns, enabling the narrator to go over the same ground more than once and giving the reader many potential beginnings. As we move between times and places - Stockholm in the 1890s, Indonesia in the early years of this century and in the 1970s, Paris in the 1980s, the orchards by Lake Malaren in the late 1940s — time is at once recaptured and suspended, the characters gradually merging across the generations and the archetypal dimensions of their situations becoming apparent. The paradoxes of Abel, of the text itself and of time culminate in that of the narrator; in Agneta Pleijel's description of the novel as 'the story of a human being

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who is in the process of telling the story of how she is telling a story'26 the emphasis, ultimately, is on 'a human being'. This narrator gradually unleashes that inner self which her grandfather either decided to suppress or simply failed to trust. The process is a difficult and painful one, and the self that emerges is hesitant and uncertain, to the point of temporarily abandoning her project. Yet she returns, continuing to allow herself to be guided by memories and dreams. The ultimate paradox of this multi-faceted novel is that it celebrates, in the context of postmodernism, the significance of the soul. Agneta Pleijel's next novel, Hundstjdrnan (The Dog Star, 1989), develops its paradoxes very differently. Again, it has a female first-person narrator; and despite the fact that she is no more than 12 or 13 years old she emerges, along with her grandmother, as one of the text's strong and influential female characters. At one level, The Dog Star can be seen as restating the conflict from Angels, Dwarfs between the dwarf and the princess, between body and soul, but here there is no resolution as the very paradoxes of the tensions between the two are explored. Ingert, the young narrator, is telling a story about love. Her father, Lamek, is living with Siiri, and Ingert also has a younger brother. Siiri is scarred by her experiences of the Second World War in Finland, and Lamek's lifestyle puts further strain on the family, with the children frequently left to look after themselves. In the context of this family, the young girl's narrative assumes an almost ritual significance: 'I wanted to rescue us from that which had no words, all the time we seemed to be sinking back into it'.27 And her narrative is comprehensive, guided by an innocence which gives a touch of beauty even to that which is essentially brutal: 'If there is a God who looks to the human beings in love, then I hope he looks to our family who have had so much trouble with love, mainly because there has been so much of it'.28 Ingert's narrative control makes for gradual and understated revelations — about the quality of her father's relationship with his mother, about her father's relationship with a daughter he has with another woman, and, in no more than veiled hints, about her own relationship with her younger brother. Her innocence makes her ignorant of the forces she is dealing with, just as she seems to have little knowledge of the power of words, sending her mother running

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away from home with a careless revelation. As if echoing some of the major works of Birgitta Trotzig with which this novel has some interesting parallels, the chaos and confusion haunting this family eventually become a measure of its alienation in the symbolic and its craving for the security and wholeness of the semiotic. The Dog Star is a powerful novel, the almost relentless control of the subject matter resulting in a focusing of paradoxes that is more consistent and certainly more merciless than in He who Observeth the Wind. Fungi (Fungi), the novel which Agneta Pleijel published in 1993, returns to the exotic setting of Indonesia. The central character, the narrator and, indeed, the fictitious author is the nineteenth-century naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, whose account of the slaughter by wild animals of giant turtles about to lay their eggs on a beach in Java was utilised by Schopenhauer in a footnote. Junghuhn's story, which involves extensive travels before he arrives in Java and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the scenery and the variety of plant and animal life, amounts to a tangible search for identity, but this is expanded by his struggle with the thought of Schopenhauer, whom he has heard lecturing in Berlin. Junghuhn's antithetical belief in the harmony of nature and the role of love is illustrated in his life as well as his text, his spell inside the upturned shell of a giant turtle where he lies like 'a foetus, resting in the female turtle's boat as if in a womb',29 confirming the pull of the semiotic. Agneta Pleijel's oeuvre, which also includes a second collection of poetry, Ogon ur en dro'm (Eyes from a Dream, 1984), combines a preoccupation with female characters and a focusing on liberation in terms that are probably not wholly unrelated to the simultaneous development of feminism. Her multi-faceted investigations into identity reflect a central preoccupation in Swedish literature, and perhaps in texts by women in particular, over the past few decades. MARE KANDRE (BORN 1962)

Mare Kandre's 1991 novel, Aliide, Aliide, contains a striking depiction of the creative urge that a clean sheet of paper and a crayon can unleash in the central character: Sometimes the power was such that she couldn't control her hand but it moved by itself, or was conducted by the picture

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itself, by what she was in the process of drawing; by the tree or the strange dog with three eyes or the lonely dead little girl whose face could be glimpsed behind the window of the locked house. And it was glowing and aching with all that which now, at once, had to get out before it was too late! Her arm grew numb almost up to her elbow, and the outside world with its people, all its life, she could no longer take in.30 The powerful imagery, conveyed by a vivid, rhythmical language which, as her writing develops, becomes increasingly prone to challenging the conventions of genre and style, is one of Mare Kandre's hallmarks. And it is no accident that the artist portrayed above is female: in almost all her books to date, the central character is a young girl or a woman who, moreover, reflects a growing awareness of the restrictions imposed by patriarchal society on female creativity. But the exclusion of the outside world, referred to at the end of the passage above, is conspicuous only in Mare Kandre's early books, as the perspective of the young girl confronted by adulthood gradually expands to allow more wide-ranging investigations into human existence. Mare Kandre was born in 1962 into a family of Estonian origin. As a child she spent some years in Canada, but the family then returned to Sweden and settled in Gothenburg. Both milieux are reflected in her early books. Having decided in her early teens to become a writer, Mare Kandre left school at the age of 16 and had her first book published when she was 22.31 At the time of her debut, she was a member of a punk band; she has also had paintings exhibited in Stockholm, where she now lives. Gradually, however, her writing has taken over, and to date she has published eight books. She is generally regarded as one of Sweden's most promising young writers. / ett annat land (In a Different Country), the book which Mare Kandre published in 1984, is a series of prose texts exploring the issue of identity via the experiences of a young girl. There is little plot in the conventional sense: the focus is on the first-person narrator's relations with the surrounding world and with her self. The strongly atmospheric language with its evocative imagery endows the setting with dimensions that are both physical and

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psychological, making the young girl emerge as so many reflections of her environment. The prose poems in Bebadelsen (The Annunciation, 1986), explore the experiences of a girl at the age of puberty, again developing original imagery and a language that made one reviewer discern parallels with Sylvia Plath as well as Birgitta Trotzig.32 To some extent, the book can be seen to anticipate Btibins unge (Biibin's Kid, 1987), the novel which came to mark Mare Kandre's breakthrough. Here the first-person narrator is again a young girl. She is living with a woman and a man known as Biibin and Uncle, but these characters fade away as the central character's physical growth and development begin to command all attention. The sparse and highly charged language depict her as of a piece with nature, for worse rather than for better: I cannot venture out, I am not big enough, I cannot hang on, I am disappearing into this furious growing! I am sitting far in, deep inside my body, listening to the bushes scratching the walls of the house, the grass turning white again, the hard earth beneath the stones softening, and it cannot resist any longer, there is nothing left: no one escapes it, no one finds a way out! I am holding on to Uncle's chair with my eyes closed. Outside the world is falling apart with this growing. Bit by bit.33 As the central character begins to menstruate, the landscape becomes increasingly surreal, the grass standing to the height of tall reeds and the stalks of the nettles growing to the thickness of the trunks of young trees.34 In the midst of these threatening transformations, the central character now finds herself alone but for the Kid, who suddenly appears as the embodiment of the adolescent's sense of split and alienation. Small and innocent and cosseted by the adults as long as they have remained, the Kid becomes the butt of the confusion and anger raging in the older girl. The torture and killing of the Kid, presented as prerequisites for the adult phase of the central character's life, convey the extent of the plight of the adolescent girl in this powerful text. Aliide, Aliide (1991), Mare Kandre's most ambitious work to date, again focuses on a young girl and on processes that are

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necessarily and painfully private. The greater detail of this narrative makes for an unusual intensity, enhanced by the fact that the third-person narrator retains a perspective very close to that of Aliide herself. Aliide is a young schoolgirl who has recently arrived from an English-speaking country to a Swedish seaport where she now lives with her family, including a younger brother. While they have a flat in a new high-rise block, much of the surrounding area towards the harbour consists of narrow streets with old, dilapidated houses whose gateways open on to dark courtyards and flights of creaking wooden stairs. In the first third of the book it is this dark and threatening environment that predominates as Aliide criss-crosses it with a friend from school, observing a prostitute and a battered woman and coping with the approaches of drunken men. Aliide's perspective on life could be described as hypersensitive, and at one level the dark and frightening places to which she is drawn function as images, as substitutes for something else. A routine medical examination at school brings Aliide's suppressed trauma closer to the surface. Vivid dreams and images chart her journey into compulsive behaviour, self-hatred and guilt, the text overwhelmingly conveying the depth of her feelings as the necessity of covering up her situation splits her against herself. The sight of pregnant women reinforces her sense of fragmentation as she envisages that which has been forced into them and is now growing beyond control;35 and for all her efforts to protect her family, her effective separation from them is confirmed by a nightmarish and perhaps visionary experience which shows up their passivity and helplessness as a drunken intruder frightens Aliide into hiding.36 Summer brings the traditional family visit to Aliide's grandparents, in the mountains by a lake which is reputed to contain a monster, although the girl looks in vain for any sign that 'something enormous and monstrous was living in their midst, year in and year out, in the best of health'.37 In the oppressive atmosphere of this family circle, the surreal world of imagery is unleashed as Aliide is nauseated by a meal in which fish from the lake, netted by her grandfather, becomes the progeny of the monster and berries from the garden turn into clots of blood and pieces of internal organs. The immediate solution to Aliide's riddle is of less interest than

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the psychological conviction and narrative control which Mare Kandre brings to bear on this text about a victim of child sexual abuse, the compulsive use of imagery in particular confronting the reader with the profound sense of alienation and fragmentation that is haunting the central character. A.liide, Aliide claims, perhaps unconvincingly, that its central character is its fictitious author. In Deliria (Deliria, 1992), by contrast, an author who would seem to have much in common with Mare Kandre appears repeatedly, reinforcing the self-reflexivity of the text. With regard to form, this work is Mare Kandre's most experimental yet, mixing a sparse, poetic prose with more distinctive poems; Kerstin Ekman's The Knife-Thrower's Woman may well have served as a source of inspiration. The complexity and deliberate unsettledness of the text is reinforced by the structure, with sections contrasted against each other and left suspended by their mutual tensions. Deliria is a book about writing perceived in the context of death, about the urge and need for creativity in a world bent on destruction. The text conveys a strong ecological consciousness; and it is most emphatically a text written by a woman, an on-going search for a new and more adequate language. Mare Kandre has described how both her subsequent books were born out of the sense of freedom she experienced when writing Deliria;38 and bolder approaches to both subject matter and text certainly characterise her latest volumes. Dja'vulen och Gud (The Devil and God, 1993) uses a sparse, poetic prose to tear apart the grandest of the grand narratives. In Mare Kandre's version, the Devil is the complex and interesting character while God begins life as a spoilt little boy and soon loses interest in his creation. Depicting how humankind thoughtlessly depletes the resources of the earth and indulges in one war more destructive than the other, the text's litany of devastation rises to a crescendo as God's final visit to earth reveals an apocalyptic landscape where the oceans have dried out and fire and poison have ruined all life. The text combines seriousness with a refreshing lack of respect; but the conclusion with its general reconciliation and convenient fresh start fails to do justice to the issues that have been raised. Quinnan och Dr Dreuf (Woman and Dr Dreuf, 1994), is a very different kind of work, triumphant in its sense of humour and

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ingenious control. Narrated in the third person, most of this text is a dialogue, with the sparse prose slowing down the pace and reinforcing the rhythm of the language. The setting is the consulting room of Dr Dreuf, the famous psychoanalyst. The woman who comes to consult him is troubled by the countless female characters who seem to be crowding within her and demand her constant attention. Her analysis revals these female characters to include Eve, a nun in the Middle Ages, a witch burnt at the stake, an upper-class lady around 1700, and a girl raped in a forest. The antithetical structure from Deliria is apparent here, but most striking is the intensity with which the analysand conveys the plight of these women, to the extent that she assumes the identity of each one of them and the smells and sounds of the scenes she depicts fill Dr Dreuf s room. This physical vividness is in sharp contrast to the setting of the consulting room, where a shrunken, dwarf-like Dr Dreuf sits surrounded by the dusty, disintegrating volumes of Professor Popokoff from which he has derived the sum total of his knowledge about woman. And the triumphant climax here is the gradual revelation that the analysand who is so troubled by these female characters is in fact identical with the narrator, or even with the author herself. Allusions to texts such as Aliide, Aliide and Deliria unambiguously locate this narrative within Mare Kandre's oeuvre, establishing the author as the hidden analyst who analyses Dr Dreuf as he analyses his woman patient. As information travels unhindered between the narrator/author and the woman patient, Dr Dreuf is irresistibly trapped, revealing prejudices that are characteristic of patriarchal society in general rather than of Freud's thought in particular. The analysand's attempt to strangle Dr Dreuf brings into sharp focus the fact that the consulting room is effectively a mental hospital to which women are confined against their will. But it is the text as such that ultimately triumphs over Dr Dreuf and the system which he represents: anxious to be the one who is doing the writing,39 he pours scorn on the analysand's ambitions to write;40 but it is clearly these ambitions which, on the level of fiction, have resulted in the book which so strikingly reveals Dr Dreuf for what he is. Inventive and funny, Woman and Dr Dreuf is further evidence of the versatility and range of Mare Kandre's talent.

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Much of the work of these three writers explores the situation of women and the issue of feminine identity, and it does so with an almost exuberant sense of artistic freedom, a delight in the limitless possibilities available. Perhaps the most striking common factor in these three oeuvres is the belief, in an age of mass media, in the capacity of the literary text and the communicative powers of the work of art. It is a belief that augurs well for the future.

Conclusions Perhaps the most famous account of poetic inspiration in Swedish literature is Selma Lagerlof s description of the moment when she realised, while walking along a Stockholm street, how the tales and traditions she had known since she was a child could be turned into a work of art: In this way it came about that she caught sight of the story for the first time. And as she did so, the ground beneath her feet began to quake. The whole length of Malmskillnadsgatan, from the slope of Hamngatan all the way up to the fire station, rose towards the sky and sank again, rose and sank. She had to stand still for quite a while until the street had settled down, and she looked in surprise at the passers-by who were walking so calmly and did not notice the miracle that had taken place.1 Selma Lagerlof, as Kerstin Ekman has pointed out, had discovered that her subjectivity offered as valid a basis for a work of literature as the male authors she admired possessed in theirs.2 This trust in feminine subjectivity, bolstered and expanded by an increasingly distinctive tradition of women's writing, is fundamental to the radical alternatives that Swedish women writers develop as modern Swedish society is taking shape around them. In a famous analysis of British women's writing, dating from the mid-1970s and covering more or less the same period as the present volume, Elaine Showalter has distinguished three stages, labelling them in turn the Feminine, the Feminist and the Female.3 The first of these, characterised by imitation of the dominant tradition and internalisation of its standards and views, is perceived as lasting from around the 1840s to the 1880s; while the Feminist phase with its protest against the standards of the dominant tradition and its advocacy of minority values covers the period from 1880 to around 1920; and the Female phase preoccupied with self-discovery stretches from 1920 onwards, but with a new stage of self-awareness characterising the

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period since about I960.4 Although Elaine Showalter points to the importance of overlaps, her divisions, inspired by analyses of literary subcultures, seem somewhat questionable from our viewpoint in the mid-1990s, and they shed only limited light on the development of women's writing in Sweden. As we have seen, the element of protest is present from the outset, with feminine or, indeed, feminist radicalism uniting many of the oeuvres I have analysed above and conveying a more or less explicit social criticism. We have encountered this radicalism in Fredrika Bremer's preference for the family or the group of siblings as a model social structure, Selma Lagerlof s celebrations of love and humanity, and Elin Wagner's foregrounding of feminine values, including her emphasis on peace and on respect for the environment, as well as in Karin Boye's preoccupation with the green-world archetype, Birgitta Trotzig's explorations of the semiotic, and Kerstin Ekman's depiction of a women's world, already in existence as a subversive alternative. As is clear from the work of writers like Moa Martinson and Sara Lidman, the old peasant society, so relatively close in Swedish history, is in no way a nostalgic ideal, but it is seen to harbour an important affinity between humankind and nature which is also strongly reflected in the work of Elin Wagner. Probably the most conspicuous element of this broadly social radicalism is the pacifism that is central to the contributions of so many Swedish women writers, from Fredrika Bremer, Selma Lagerlof, Ellen Key and Elin Wagner, to Karin Boye, Moa Martinson, Elsa Grave, Ann-Margret Dahlquist-Ljungberg, Elisabet Hermodsson, Birgitta Trotzig and Kerstin Ekman, among others, and which represents such an insistent challenge to the militarism traditionally associated with the patriarchal system. The preoccupation with self-discovery, perceived by Elaine Showalter as beginning, in her British material, around 1920, is also an on-going process in Swedish women's writing, although it is clear that it has gained in urgency and importance during this century. Selma Lagerlof s account of the young woman's experience of the street quaking under her feet and all the familiar landmarks being called into question refers, in strictly biographical terms, to an event that took place in the early 1880s but which, in its implications, is hardly less relevant in a postmodern context.

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While feminine identity has been approached in terms of radical mythical patterns in texts by writers such as Fredrika Bremer, Elin Wagner and also Kerstin Ekman, the focus in the texts of Selma Lagerlof on the transgression of boundaries and the implications of such acts can be seen to point ahead to the wider questioning of phallogocentrism in the work of authors like Karin Boye and Birgitta Trotzig and also to the increasingly radical investigations of language and meaning in the oeuvres of Agneta Pleijel, Mare Kandre and other women writers over the past few decades. The construction of what Patricia Waugh has termed 'self in relationship', which can be perceived as central to a number of these more recent projects (see Chapter 9), connects, at one level, with the strong social, pacifist and environmental awareness in Swedish women's writing outlined above. Probably the most comprehensive exploration of both social radicalism and the textual development of feminine identity, including the interconnections between the two, is to be found in Kerstin Ekman's tetralogy, culminating in the last volume, A City of Light (1983). As Ann-Marie writes her self - 'the ink is pushing me like rain, like a dry grass fire across the pages. It leaves writing in me, marks in my flesh, scars filled with ink'5 — her multiplicity of stories constructs a self in relationship to whom relationships are indeed the key to an alternative society. This can be observed at the immediate level, with Ann-Marie's sustained critique of the ugliness of the town surrounding her and the crudeness of the system that has generated it culminating in her insight that 'we did not simply come here in order to build a society. We came here to live our lives with each other'.6 But in Kerstin Ekman's novel the self in relationship emerges more strikingly at other and less tangible levels, notably in the configurations of central female characters which raise such urgent questions concerning identity; and in Ann-Marie's affinity with the perfect harmony of the world of Ishnol which allows her to merge with the surging masses of leaves in the trees. We have traced, throughout the past century and a half, the acceptance of women's writing in Sweden and the more gradual realisation of its significance. And not only is contemporary women's writing, by the mid-1990s, in a strongly innovative

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phase: thanks to the work of feminist critics in particular, the country's powerful tradition of women's writing is continuously made to yield new and exciting dimensions. Never before has Swedish women's writing, in all its aspects, shown such vigorous and many-faceted development.

Notes All translations from Swedish in this volume are my own, unless otherwise stated. INTRODUCTION 1 See Helena Forsas-Scott: 'From Concept of Woman Studies to Gendered Texts: Feminist Literary Criticism in Sweden', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 18, 1995, no. 2, pp. 223-33. 2 Margaretha Fahlgren: Kvinnans ekvation. Kon, makt och rationalitet i Strindbergs forfattarskap (Woman's Equation: Gender, Power and Rationality in the Oeuvre of Strindberg) (Carlssons, Stockholm 1994). 3 Torben Brostr0m and Mette Winge (eds): Danske digtere i det 20. drhundrede (Danish Authors in the Twentieth Century) (5 vols, Gad, Copenhagen 1980-82). 4 Irene Engelstad e£ al. (eds): Norsk kvinnelitteraturhistorie (History of Women's Writing in Norway) (3 vols, Pax, Oslo 1988-90). 5 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (Swedish Literature), vols. I-V (Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-89); Lars Lonnroth and Sverker Goransson (eds): Den svenska litteraturen, vol. VI (Bonniers, Stockholm 1990); Lars Lonnroth and Hans-Erik Johannesson (eds): Den svenska litteraturen, vol. VII (Bonniers, Stockholm 1990). 6 Elisabeth M011er Jensen (ed.): Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (History of Writing by Women in Scandinavia) (vols I, II —, Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993-). CHAPTER 1 The Pioneers 1 Jan Cornell (ed.): Den svenska historien (Swedish History) (20 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1966-68), vol. VIII, p. 284. (SH) 2 Ibid., pp. 285-6. 3 Fredrika Bremer: England om hosten 1851 (England in Autumn 1851), ed. Klarajohanson (Norstedts, Stockholm 1922), p. 51. 4 SH, vol. VIII, p. 287. 5 Ibid., p. 286. 6 Yvonne Leffler: 'Den kvinnliga publiken och de kvinnliga forfattarnas

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7

8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

Swedish Women's Writing betydelse for romanens genombrott i Norden' ('The Female Audience and the Role of the Women Writers in the Breakthrough of the Novel in Scandinavia'), Nordica, vol. 8, 1991, p. 240. Eva Borgstrom: 'Om Jag far be om olost.' Kring kvinnliga forfattares kvinnobilder i svensk romantik ('Could I Have Beer-Posset, Please.' On the Images of Women Portrayed by Women Writers of the Swedish Romantic Age)-(Anamma forlag, Gothenburg 1991), passim. Agneta Pleijel: 'Den kvinnliga forfattaren och offentligheten. Om Anna Maria Lenngren' ('The Female Writer and the Public Sphere. On Anna Maria Lenngren'), in Lars Ardelius and Gunnar Rydstrom (eds): Forfattarnas litteraturhistoria (The Authors' History of Literature) (Forfattarfdrlaget, Stockholm, 1977), vol. I, pp. 204-19; Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: 'Fran Smakens Tempel till Parnassen. Om Anna Maria Lenngren' ('From the Temple of Taste to the Parnassus. On Anna Maria Lenngren'), in Elisabeth M011er Jensen (ed.): Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (History of Writing by Women in Scandinavia) (vols I, II - Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993-), vol. I, pp. 405-6. Leffler, 'Den kvinnliga publiken', p. 246. Yvonne Leffler and Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: 'Skrack och skargard. Om Emilie Flygare-Carlen' ('The Gothic and the Archipelago. On Emilie Flygare-Carlen'), in Elisabeth M011er Jensen (ed.): Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (vols I, II —, Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993-), vol. II, p. 263. Ibid., p. 262. SH, vol. VIII, p. 319. Goran Therborn: 'Hur det hela borjade. Nar och varfor det moderna Sverige blev vad det blev' ('How It All Began: When and Why Modern Sweden Turned Out as It Did'), in Ulf Himmelstrand and Goran Svensson (eds): Sverige — vardag och struktur. Sociologer beskriver det svenska samhallet (Norstedts, Stockholm 1988), p. 26. SH, vol. IX, p. 38. Therborn, 'Hur det hela borjade', p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 45. SH, vol. IX, p. 159. Beata Losman: 'Kvinnoorganisering och kvinnororelser i Sverige' ('The Organisation of Women and Women's Movements in Sweden'), in Gunhild Kyle (ed.): Handbok i svensk kvinnohistoria (Carlssons, Stockholm 1987) pp. 210-11. Ibid., pp. 200-1. Pil Dahlerup: 'Den kvindelige naturalist' ('The Female Naturalist'), Vinduet, 1975, no. 2, p. 30.

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22 Margaretha Fahlgren: Kvinnans ekvation. Kb'n, makt och rationalitet i Strindbergs forfattarskap (Woman's Equation: Gender, Power and Rationality in the Oeuvre of Strindberg) (Carlssons, Stockholm 1994), passim. 23 Ingeborg Nordin Hennel: 'Strid ar sanning, frid ar logn. Orn Alfhild Agrell och Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler' ('Struggle is Truth, Peace is Deceit. On Alfhild Agrell and Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler'), in Elisabeth M011er Jensen (ed.): Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (vols I, II —, Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993—), vol. II, p. 513. — Translated into English and retitled Karin, the play was performed at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in 1892 with Elizabeth Robins in the title role. See review in The Speaker, 21 May 1892, pp. 617-18. 24 Alfhild Agrell: Do'md, in Dramatiska arbeten (Dramatic Works), vol. II (Oscar Lamm, Stockholm 1884), p. 89. 25 Alfhild Agrell: Ensam (Seligmann, Stockholm 1886), p. 99. 26 She married twice, and some of her work was published under the names of Edgren or Edgren-Leffler. 27 An English translation of the play was published (Samuel French, London n.d. [copy in The British Library, London, stamped 18 Sept. 1890]), but there is no evidence of it having been performed. 28 August Strindberg's The Father has been read as a reply to True Women: see Vivi Edstrom: 'Spelet om dottern i Strindbergs Fadren ('The Play about the Daughter in Strindberg's The Father'), Svenskldrarforeningens drsskrift, 1975, p. 112. 29 Victoria Benedictsson: 'Ur morkret' ('Out of the Darkness'), in Ernst Ahlgren: Berdttelser och utkast (Stories and Sketches) (Z. Haeggstrom, Stockholm 1888), p. 237. (UM) 30 Ibid., p. 242. 31 Victoria Benedictsson: Stora Boken och Dagboken (The Big Book and the Diary), vol. Ill, ed. Christina Sjoblad (Liber forlag, Stockholm 1985), p. 267. 32 UM, p. 241. 33 Richard F. Tomasson: Sweden: Prototype of Modern Society, (Random House, New York 1970), p. 9. 34 Karin Widerberg: Kvinnor, klasser och lagar il'50-1980 (Women, Class and Legislation 1750-1980), (Liber forlag, Stockholm 1980), p. 69. 35 Therborn, 'Hur det hela borjade', p. 45. 36 Lydia Wahlstrom: Den svenska kvinnorb'relsen. Historisk oversikt (The Women's Movement in Sweden: An Historical Survey) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1933), p. 71.

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37 Losman, 'Kvinnoorganisering och kvinnororelser', p. 217. 38 Bernt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin: Litteraturens historia i Sverige (The History of Literature in Sweden) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1987), p. 289. 39 Selma Lagerlof: Du lar mig att blifri. Selma Lagerlof skriver till Sophie Elkan (You Teach Me to be Free. Selma Lagerlof Writes to Sophie Elkan), ed. Ying Toijer-Nilsson (Bonniers, Stockholm 1992), p. 89, p. 90, p. 243. 40 Beata Losman: Kamp for ett nytt kvinnoliv. Ellen Keys ideer och deras betydelsefor sekelskiftets unga kvinnor (The Struggle for a New Life for Women. The Ideas of Ellen Key and their Significance for Young Women at the Turn of the Century) (Liber forlag, Stockholm 1980), p. 4. 41 Ronny Ambjornsson: 'Ellen Key: Miljo, liv, ideer' ('Ellen Key: Environment, Life Ideas'), in Ellen Key: Hemmets drhundrade (The Century of the Home), ed. Ronny Ambjornsson (Aldus, Stockholm 1976), p. 29. 42 Losman, Kamp for ett nytt kvinnoliv, p. 10. 43 Ambjornsson, 'Ellen Key', p. 38. 44 Quoted in Cheri Register: 'Motherhood at Center: Ellen Key's Social Vision', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 5, 1982, p. 601. 45 Ellen Key: 'Samhallsrnoderlighet' ('Social Motherliness'), in Ellen Key, Hemmets drhundrade, ed. Ronny Ambjornsson (Aldus, Stockholm 1976), p. 167. 46 Register, 'Motherhood at Center', p. 604. 47 Losman, Kamp for ett nytt kvinnoliv, p. 170. 48 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. IV, p. 235. 49 Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Virago, London 1978), p. 47, p. 56. 50 Fredrika Bremer: Brev (Letters), ed Klara Johanson and Ellen Kleman (4 vols, Norstedts, Stockholm 1915-20), vol. I, p. 158. 51 Ingeborg Nordin Hennel: Domd och glomd. En studie i Aljhild Agrells liv och dikt (Condemned and Forgotten: A Study of Alfhild Agrell's Life and Work) (Umea University, Umea 1981), pp. 39-41. 52 Nils Afzelius, quoted in Elin Wagner: Selma Lagerlof (2 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1942-43), vol. II, p. 303.

CHAPTER 2 Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865)

1 E. [pseudonym]: review of Fredrika Bremer: Home; or Family Cares and Family Joys, Westminster Review, vol. 40, 1843, p. 457.

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2 Victor Svanberg: Medelklassrealism (The Realism of the Middle Classes) [1944] (Gidlunds, Stockholm 1980), p. 161. 3 Algot Werin: 'Fredrika Bremer', in Svenskt 1800-td. Litterdra essayer (The Nineteenth Century in Sweden: Literary Essays) (Gleerups, Lund 1948), pp. 48-9. 4 Birgitta Holm: Fredrika Bremer och den borgerliga romanens jb'delse (Fredrika Bremer and the Birth of the Bourgeois Novel) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1981), passim. 5 Karin Carsten Monten: 'Mytiska monster i Hertha' ('Mythical Patterns in Hertha'), in Birgitta Holm (ed.), Fredrika Bremer ute och hemma (Uppsala University, Uppsala 1987), pp. 26-41. 6 Fredrika Bremer: Sjeljbiografiska anteckningar, bref och efterlemnade skrifter; jemte en teckning af hennes lefnad och personlighet (Autobiographical Notes, Letters, and Posthumous Works; along -with a Sketch of her Life and Personality), ed. Charlotte Bremer, (2 vols, Abr. Bohlin, Orebro 1868), vol. I, pp. 12-13. 7 Fredrika Bremer: Fredrika Bremers brev (Fredrika Bremer's Letters), eds. Klara Johanson and Ellen Kleman (4 vols, Norstedts, Stockholm 1915-20), vol. I, p. 155. (FBB) 8 Fredrika Bremer: 'Om Qvinnans stilla kallelse. Tvanne genmalen till Erkebiskop J.O. Wallin' ('On the Quiet Calling of Woman: Two Replies to Archbishop J.O. Wallin'), in Tvenne Efterldmnade skrifter jdmte ndgra bref af Fredrika Bremer (Two Posthumous Works and Some Letters by Fredrika Bremer), ed. Anna Hierta-Retzius (C.E. Fritze, Stockholm 1902), p. 55. 9 Ibid., p. 54. 10 FBB, vol. I, p. 158. 11 Ibid., p. 198. 12 Ibid., pp. 395-6. 13 Ibid., p. 396. 14 Brita K. Stendahl: The Education of a Self-Made Woman: Fredrika Bremer 1801—1865 (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewis ton/Queens ton, Lampeter 1994), pp. 159-67. 15 FBB, vol. I, p. 169. 16 Ibid., p. 199. 17 Fredrika Bremer: 'Om romanen sasom var tids epos' ('On the Novel as the Epic of our Time'), Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofartstidning, 20 Jan. 1853. 18 Greta Wieselgren: Fredrika Bremer och verkligheten. Romanen Herthas tillblivelse (Fredrika Bremer and Reality. The Creation of the Novel Hertha) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1978), p. 97. 19 FBB, vol. I, p. 312.

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20 Fredrika Bremer, The Colonel's Family, tr. Sarah Death (Norvik Press, Norwich 1995), p. 176. 21 Ibid., p. 133. 22 Holm, Fredrika Bremer, p. 92. 23 Ibid., p. 193. 24 Ibid., pp. 66-87. 25 Ibid., pp. 220-21. 26 S. L-D. Adlersparre and Sigrid Leijonhufvud: Fredrika Bremer: Biogrqfisk studie (Fredrika Bremer: A Biographical Study) (2 vols, Norstedts, Stockholm 1896), vol. I, p. 70. 27 Holm, Fredrika Bremer, p. 85. 28 [Fredrika Bremer]: Presidentens dottrar. Berdttelse af en guvernante (L.J. Hierta, Stockholm 1834), pp. 25-9. 29 Annis Pratt with Barbara White, Andrea Loewenstein and Mary Wyer: Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Harvester, Brighton 1982), p. 17. 30 Adlersparre and Leijonhufvud, Fredrika Bremer, vol. I, pp. 271—2. 31 FBB, vol. I, p. 359. 32 Ibid., p. 362. 33 [FredrikaBremer]: Grannarne (Schmidt, Christianstad 1837), pp.2912. 34 E. N. Tigerstedt (ed.): Ny illustrerad svensk litteraturhistoria (New Illustrated History of Swedish Literature) (4 vols, Natur & Kultur, Stockholm 1967), vol. Ill, p. 399. 35 Eva Borgstrom: 'Om jag far be om olost.' Kring kvinnliga forfattares kvinnobilder i svensk romantik ('Could I have Beer-Posset, Please.' On the Images of Women Portrayed by Women Writers of the Swedish Romantic Age.) (Anamma fb'rlag, Gothenburg 1991), pp. 113-47. 36 [Fredrika Bremer]: Hemmet, eller Familje-sorger ochfrojder (L.J. Hierta, Stockholm 1839), p. 73. 37 Borgstrom, 'Om jag far be om olost', pp. 113-47. 38 Ibid., pp. 146, 139-44. 39 FBB, vol. II, p. 325. 40 Ibid., p. 326. 41 Fredrika Bremer: Nya Teckningar ur Hvardagslifvet, vol. VI, En dagbok (L.J. Hjerta, Stockholm 1843), p. 51. 42 H.R. Ellis Davidson: Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1964), p. 123. 43 Fredrika Bremer: Syskonlif(L.]. Hjerta, Stockholm 1848), p. 264. 44 Alf Kjellen: Sociala ideer och motiv hos svenska fo'rfattare under 1830och 1840-talen (Social Ideas and Motifs in Swedish Authors in

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the 1830s and 1840s), vol. II (Hugo Gebers Forlag, Stockholm 1950), p. 204. Fredrika Bremen Det unga Amerika (Young America), ed. Klara Johanson (Wahlstrom & Widstrand, Stockholm 1927), p. 6. Lars Wendelius: Fredrika Bremen Amerikabild. En studie i Hemmen i den Nya Verlden (Fredrika Bremer's Image of America: A Study of The Homes of the New World) (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm 1985), p. 54. FBB, vol. Ill, p. 562. Fredrika Bremen Hertha, eller en sjdls historia (Adolf Bonnier, Stockholm 1856), p. 20. Monten, 'Mytiska monster i Hertha', p. 31. Gunnar Qvist, Fredrika Bremer och kvinnans emancipation (Fredrika Bremer and the Emancipation of Women) (Scandinavian University Press, Akademiforlaget, Gothenburg 1969), argues that Hertha had no influence on the legislation that followed. His findings have been subjected to a critical reassessment by Greta Wieselgren, 'Romanen Herthas betydelse for myndighetsreformen 1858' ('The Importance of the Novel Hertha for the Legal Majority Reform in 1858'), in Birgitta Holm (ed.), Fredrika Bremer ute och hemma (Uppsala University, Uppsala 1987), pp. 95-113.

CHAPTER 3 Selma Lagerlof(1858-1940) 1 Selma Lagerlof: Mdrbacka med Ett barns memoarer och Dagbok (Mdrbacka with Memoirs of a Child and Diary) [1922, 1930, 1932] (Bonniers, Stockholm 1958), p. 63. (MS) 2 Oscar Levertin: 'Selma Lagerlof, in Oscar Levertin: Svenska gestalter (Swedish Figures) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1903), pp. 267—8. 3 Walter A. Berendsohn: Selma Lagerlof: Her Life and Work, adapted fr. the German [1927] by George F. Timpson (Nicholson & Watson, London 1931), passim. 4 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. IV, p. 103. 5 Ibid., p. 98, p. 101. 6 MS, p. 63. 7 Birgitta Holm: Selma Lagerlof och ursprungets roman (Selma Lagerlof and the Novel of Origins) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1984); Ulla Torpe: Orden ochjorden. En studie i Selma Lagerlofs roman Liljecronas hem (The Words and the Soil: A Study of Selma Lagerlofs Novel Liljecrona's Home) (Gidlunds, Hedemora 1992). 8 Torpe, Orden ochjorden, p. 26. 9 Elin Wagner: Selma Lagerlof (2 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1942-43),

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vol. I, p. 21. 10 Selma Lagerlof: Brev (Letters), ed. Ying Toijer-Nilsson, 2 vols (Selma Lagerlof-sallskapet, Lund 1967-69), vol. II, p. 71. (SLB) 11 Luce Irigaray: This Sex which is Not One [1977], tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York 1985), pp. 76-8. 12 Wagner, Selma Lagerlof, vol. I, p. 24. 13 Some of the major contributions are Vivi Edstrom: Livets stigar. Tiden, handlingen och livskanslan i Gosta Berlings saga (The Paths of Life: Time, Plot and Vitality in Gosta Berling's Saga) (Svenska bokfbrlaget/Norstedts, Stockholm 1960); Ulla-Britta Lagerroth: Korkarlen och Bannlyst. Motiv- och idestudier i Selma Lagerlofs 10talsdiktning (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness and The Outcast: Studies of Motifs and Ideas in Selma Lagerlofs Work of the 1910s) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1963); Erland Lagerroth: Selma Lagerlof och Bohuslan. En studie i hennes 90-talsdiktning (Selma Lagerlof and Bohuslan: A Study of her Work of the 1890s) (Gleerups, Lund 1963); Vivi Edstrom: Selma Lagerlofs littemra prqfil (The Literary Profile of Selma Lagerlof) (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1986). 14 Holm, Selma Lagerlof och ursprungets roman. 15 SLB, vol. I, p. 45. 16 Ibid., p. 162. 17 SLB, vol. II, p. 265. 18 Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterdra profit, 1986, p. 19. 19 M. M. Bakhtin: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [1975], ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, Austin [1981] 1982), p. 5. 20 Kerstin Ekman: 'Undret pa Malmskillnadsgatan. Om Selma Lagerlof ('The Miracle in Malmskillnadsgatan. On Selma Lagerlof), in Marie Louise Ramnefalk and Anna Westberg (eds): Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria (Forfattarforlaget, Stockholm 1981), vol. I, p. 232. 21 SLB, vol. I, p. 34. 22 Ibid., p. 50. 23 Ibid., p. 71. 24 Skrifter (Works), 12 vols (Bonniers, Stockholm 1933), vol. I, p. 19. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Selma Lagerlofs texts are from this publication, henceforth cited as Sfe. 25 Edstrom, Livets stigar, p. 89. 26 Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterdra profl., p. 40. 27 Sk, vol. I, p. 19. 28 Ibid., p. 49. 29 Ibid., p. 39.

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30 Edstrom, Livets stigar, p. 115; Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterara profit, p. 14. 31 Sk, vol. I, p. 33. 32 Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterara profit, p. 25. 33 Holm, Selma Lagerlofoch urspmngets roman, pp. 182—7. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music [1872], tr. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1993), p. 22. 35 Quoted in Vivi Edstrom: 'Att fmna stilen. En studie i Jerusalems framvaxt' ('Finding the Right Style. A Study in the Emergence of Jerusalem'}, Lagerlofstudier, vol. 4, 1971, p. 28. 36 Lagerroth, Selma Lagerlofoch Bohuslan, p. 92. A recent study of one of the short stories in this volume is Helena Forsas-Scott: 'Selma Lagerlofs "Astrid": Textual Strategy and Feminine Identity', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds): A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick (Norvik Press, Norwich 1994). 37 Gunnel Weidel: Helgon och gengdngare. Gestaltningen av kdrlek och rdttvisa i Selma Lagerlofs diktning (Saints and Ghosts: The Depiction of Love and Justice in the Work of Selma Lagerlof) (Gleerups, Lund 1964), p. 208. 38 Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterara profil (1986) p. 56. 39 Edstrom, 'Att fmna stilen', p. 28. 40 Cf. Erland Lagerroth: Selma Lagerlofs Jerusalem. Revolutions sekterism mot fddernedrvd bondeordning (Selma Lagerlofs Jerusalem: Revolutionary Secterism versus an Inherited Peasant Order) (Gleerups, Lund 1966). 41 See Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterara profil, p. 59. 42 Ibid., p. 56. 43 Sk, vol. V, p. 115. 44 Sk, vol. VI, p. 249. 45 SLB, vol. I, p. 222. 46 Ibid., p. 262. 47 Wagner, Selma Lagerlof, vol. II, p. 85. 48 Lagerroth, Korkarlen och Bannlyst, p. 42. 49 Ibid. 50 Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [1980], tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia UP, New York 1982), pp. 2-3; Holm, Selma Lagerlofoch urspmngets roman, pp. 248-73. 51 Elizabeth Gross: 'The Body of Signification', in John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (eds): Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva (Routledge, London and New York 1990), p. 90.

268 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Swedish Women's Writing Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, p. 9. Holm, Selma Lagerlof och ursprungets roman, p. 251. Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterdra profil, p. 169. Linda Schenck: 'Afterword', in Selma Lagerlof: The Lowenskold Ring, tr. Linda Schenck (Norvik Press, Norwich 1991), p. 107. Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs Utterdra profit, p. 164. SLB, vol. II, p. 304. Lars Ulvenstam: Den dldrade Selma Lagerlof (Selma Lagerlof: The Later Years) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1955), pp. 209-11. Lagerlof, The Lowenskold Ring, p. 49. Sk, vol. XI, pp. 191-2. Edstrom, Selma Lagerlofs litterdra profil, p. 175. SLB, vol. II, p. 307.

CHAPTER 4 Elin Wagner (1882-1949) 1 Ingemar Algulin: A History of Swedish Literature (Swedish Institute, Stockholm 1989), pp. 157-67; pp. 98-102; p. 176. 2 John Landquist: 'Nagra drag av Elin Wagners berattarkonst' ('Some Features of Elin Wagner's Narrative Art'), Svensk Litteraturtidskrift, vol. 12, 1949, pp. 93-4. 3 Ibid., pp. 84-5. 4 Erik Hjalmar Linder: 'Den tidsbundna Elin Wagner' ('Elin Wagner: Confined in her Time'), Stockholms-Tidningen, 28 Sept. 1951. 5 Knut Jaensson: review of Elin Wagner: Vinden vdnde bladen (The Wind Turned the Leaves Over), Dagens Nyheter, 12 Oct. 1947. 6 Joanna Russ: How to Suppress Women's Writing (Women's Press, London 1984), pp. 49-61. 7 The summary in this paragraph is based on the following works: Erik Hjalmar Linder: Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet (Five Decades of the Twentieth Century) (2 vols, Natur & Kultur 1965-66), vol. I, pp. 118-30; Gunnar Brandell: Fran 1870 till forsta vdrldskriget (From 1870 to the First World War), vol. I of Svensk litteratur 1870-1970 (Aldus, Stockholm 1975), pp. 356-9; Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. IV, pp. 161-7. 8 I have presented an overview of Elm Wagner's work in Elisabeth M011er Jensen (ed.): Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria, vol. Ill (Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993—), forthcoming. 9 Some of Elin Wagner's articles from the newspaper Tidevarvet are available in her Korpungen och jag (The Young Raven and I) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1930); another selection is to be found in Ragna Kellgren (ed.): Kvinnor i politiken. Artiklar ur den politiska,

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radikala veckotidningen Tidevarvet (1923—1936) (Women in Politics: Articles from the Radical Political Weekly The Epoch [1923-1936]) (LTs forlag, Stockholm 1971). Elin Wagner: Spinnerskan (The Spinster) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1948) contains a selection of her short stories along with the newly written title story. The other works referred to here are Tusen dr i Smdland (A Thousand Years in Smaland) (Wahlstrom & Widstrand, Stockholm 1939); and Selma Lagerlof(2 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1942-3). See Sarah Death: 'Tidevarvet: A Radical Weekly Magazine of the Inter-War Years', Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1, pp. 38-40, which highlights the parallels between the Swedish journal and the British Time and Tide. From this article I have borrowed the English version of the title of Tidevarvet. Elin Wagner: Fredrika Bremer (Norstedts, Stockholm 1949). I am indebted to Sarah Death for the English translation of the tide of Pennskaftet. Bertil Bjorkenlid: Kvinnokrav i manssamhdlle. Rostrdttskvinnorna och deras metoder som opinionsbildare och pdtryckargrupp i Sverige 1902—21 (Women's Demands in a Man-Made Society: The Suffragists and their Methods as Creators of Public Opinion and as a Pressure Group in Sweden 1902-21) (Uppsala University, Uppsala 1982), p. 213. Elin Wagner: Pennskaftet (Penwoman) (Ljus, Stockholm 1910), p. 43. (Ps) August Strindberg: Taklagsol. Syndabocken (The Topping Out Party. The Scapegoat) [1907] (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm 1984 (August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, vol. 55), p. 48. Ps, pp. 117-19. Ibid., pp. 249-50. Ibid., p. 119. Elin Wagner: Vackarklocka (Alarm Clock) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1941), p. 153. (Vk) Rosa Mayreder: Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit (E. Diederichs, Jena 1905), Eng. tr. A Survey of the Woman Problem, tr. Herman Scheffauer (Heinemann, London 1913); Geschlecht und Kultur (E. Diederichs, Jena 1923). Charlotte Perkins Oilman: The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture [1911] 3rd edn (Charlton Co., New York 1914). Lester F. Ward: Pure Sociology [1903] 2nd edn, (Macmillan, New York and London 1911.) Elin Wagner's correspondence with Emilia Fogelklou (see Chapter 1) offers unique insights into the matriarchal thinking of two feminist intellectuals. A selection of their letters has been published: Emilia Fogelklou and Elin Wagner: Kara Ili, kdraste Elin. Emilia Fogelklou och Elin

270

21

22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

Swedish Women's Writing Wagner vdxlar brev dren 1924—1949 (Dear 111, Dearest Elin: Emilia Fogelklou and Elin Wagner Exchanging Letters 1924-1949), ed. Gunnel Vallquist (Bokforlaget Asak, Delsbo 1988). Elin Wagner: 'Katastrofen' ('The Catastrophe'), in Anna-Lenah Elgstrom, Frida Steenhoff and Elin Wagner: Den kinesiska muren. Rosika Schwimmers kamp for ratten och hennes krig mot kriget (The Chinese Wall: Rosika Schwirnmer's Struggle for Justice and her War against the War) (Dahlberg, Stockholm 1917), p. 65. T. S. Eliot: 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth', in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kerfnode (Faber & Faber, London 1975), p. 177. See Helena Forsas-Scott: 'Bibeln, kvinnan och romanen. En studie av Elin Wagners Asa-Hanna' ('The Bible, Woman and the Novel: A Study of Elin Wagner's Asa-Hanna'), Samlaren, vol. 107, 1986, pp. 35-57. Elin Wagner: Den namnlosa (The Anonymous Woman) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1922), p. 18. In the oeuvre of Elin Wagner, the influence of Henri Bergson first becomes apparent around 1919; see Helena Forsas-Scott: 'The Voice of Elin Wagner: Kvarteret Oron', in Maggie Allison and Anne White (eds), Women's Voice in Literature and Society (University of Bradford, [1992]). Emilia Fogelklou: 'Det fbrgangna lever' ('The Past is Present'), in Den allra vanligaste mdnniskan (The Most Ordinary Human Being) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1931), pp. 102-3. Wagner, Selma Lagerlof. Robert Graves: The Greek Myths [1955] 2 vols (Penguin, Harmondsworth 1979), vol. I, p. 93. See Margareta Wirmark: 'Fran Barnjungfrun till Spinnerskan. Elin Wagners radiodramatik' ('From The Nursery Nurse to The Spinster: Elin Wagner's Radio Dramas'), in Par Hellstrom and Tore Wreto (eds), Ldskonst, skrivkonst, diktkonst. Aderton betraktelser over dikt och diktande jdmte en bibliografi over Thure Stenstroms skrifter (Askelin & Hagglund, Stockholm 1987). Ivar Harrie: 'Pennskaftet Elin Wagner' ('Elin Wagner the Penwoman'), Fred ochfrihet, vol. 38, 1964, no. 3, p. 6. Jane Ellen Harrison: Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion [1912] (Merlin Press, London [1963] 1977), p. xi. Elin Wagner: Dialogenfortsdtter (The Dialogue is Continuing) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1932), pp. 58-9. (DF) Jane Ellen Harrison: Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion [1903] (Merlin Press, London [1962] 1980), p. 302. Harrison, Themis, p. 485.

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35 DF, p. 400. 36 Fogelklou and Wagner, Kara Hi, karaste Elm, pp. 48—9. 37 Karl Pearson: The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution, vol. II (Edward Arnold, London and New York 1897), p. 55. 38 Elin Wagner and Elisabeth Tamm: Fred medjorden (Peace with Earth) [1940] (Arkturus, Knivsta 1985), p. 15. 39 Vk, p. 139. 40 Wagner, Selma Lagerlof, vol. II, p. 321. CHAPTER 5 Consolidation 1 Jan Cornell (ed.): Den svenska historien (10 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1966-68), vol. X, p. 18. (SH) 2 Stig Hadenius et al: Sverige efter 1900. En modern politisk historia (Sweden after 1900: A Modern Political History) llth edn (Bonniers, Stockholm 1988), p. 95. 3 Ibid., p. 92. 4 Karin Widerberg: Kvinnor, klasser och lagar 1750-1980 (Liber fbrlag, Stockholm 1980), pp. 66-7. 5 Anna Caspari Agerholt: Den norske kvinnebevegelses historic (History of the Norwegian Women's Movement) [1937], new ed. by Kari Skj0nsberg (Gyldendal, Oslo 1973), pp. 259-61. 6 Gunnar and Alva Myrdal: Km i befolkningsfrdgan (The Demographic Crisis) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1934). 7 Alva Myrdal: Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy, (Kegan Paul, French, Trubner, London 1945), p. 403. 8 Widerberg, Kvinnor, klasser och lagar, p. 87. 9 Marquis W. Childs: Sweden: The Middle Way (Faber & Faber, London 1936), p. 21. 10 Ibid., p. 22. 11 SH, vol. X, p. 144. 12 Hadenius et al, Sverige efter 1900, p. 152. 13 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska Htteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. V, pp. 14-15. 14 Pia Lamberth: 'Som ensamma fyrar i natten? En framst kvantitativ undersokning av kvinnliga svensksprakiga forfattares aktivitet 19001949' ('Like Isolated Lighthouses at Night? A Chiefly Quantitative Study of the Activity of Female Writers Writing in Swedish 1900-1949'), Tidskriftfor litteraturvetenskap, vol. 20, 1991, no. 3, pp. 32—3. 15 Bernt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin: Litteraturens historia i Sverige (Norstedts, Stockholm 1987), p. 435.

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16 Ibid., p. 436. 17 All Edith Sodergran's published poems are available in English in Complete Poems, tr. David McDuff (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastleupon-Tyne 1984). 18 Ibid., p. 59. 19 Ibid., p. 94. 20 David McDuff: 'Introduction' to Sodergran: Complete Poems, pp. 33-4. 21 Sodergran, Complete Poems, p. 117. 22 See Edith Sodergran: Ediths brev. Brevfrdn Edith Sodergran till Hagar Olsson med kommentar av Hagar Olsson (Edith's Letters: Letters from Edith Sodergran till Hagar Olsson with Comments by Hagar Olsson), ed. Hagar Olsson [1955] (Alba, Stockholm 1990). 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 George C. Schoolfield: Edith Sodergran: Modernist Poet in Finland (Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London 1984), p. 133. 25 Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: Moa Martinson. Skrift och drift i trettiotalet (Moa Martinson: Text and Desire in the 1930s) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1988), p. 78. 26 Ibid., passim. 27 Ibid., p. 93. 28 Marianne Hornstrom: 'De fattigas rikedomar. Drag i Stina Aronsons fbrfattarskap tecknade utifran Sang till Polstjdrnan' ('The Riches of the Poor: An Outline of Aspects of the Work of Stina Aronson Based on Song to the Pole Star'), in Marianne Hornstrom, Flyktlinjer. Aningar kring sprdket och kvinnan (Escape Routes. Ideas about Language and Woman) (Brutus Ostlings Bokforlag Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 1994), p. 98. 29 Erik Hjalmar Linder: Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet (2 vols, Natur & Kultur 1965-66), vol. I, p. 505. 30 Quoted in Agnes von Krusenstjerna: Samlade skrifter (Collected Works), ed. Johannes Edfelt, vol. XIII (Bonniers, Stockholm 1945), p. 502. 31 Birgitta Svanberg: Sanningen om kvinnorna. En Idsning av Agnes von Krusenstjernas romanserie Froknarna von Pahlen (The Truth about Women: A Reading of Agnes von Krusenstjerna's Multi-Volume Novel The Misses von Pahlen) (Gidlunds, Stockholm 1989). 32 Ibid., pp. 391-7. 33 Hadenius et al, Sverige efter 1900, p. 187. 34 SH, vol. X, p. 210. 35 Hadenius et al, Sverige efter 1900, p. 192.

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36 Ibid., p. 226. 37 SH, vol. X, p. 257. 38 'Higher Education in Sweden' (Fact Sheets on Sweden, Swedish Institute, Stockholm, May 1979). 39 Annika Baude and Per Holmberg: 'Konsroller i utbildning och arbete' ('Gender Roles in Education and Employment'), in Edmund Dahlstrom et al: Kvinnors liv och arbete. Svenska och norska studier av ett aktuellt samhallsproblem, rev. edn (Prisma, Stockholm 1968), pp. 185-6. 40 Ibid., p. 184. 41 Ibid., p. 187. 42 Ibid., p. 187. 43 Ibid., p. 191. 44 Ibid., p. 190, p. 193. 45 Karin Widerberg, Kvinnor, klasser och lagar, p. 84. 46 Gunnar Tornqvist (ed.): Svenskt ndringsliv i geografiskt perspektiv (The Swedish Economy in a Geographical Perspective) (Liber forlag, Malmo 1986), p. 49. 47 Baude and Holmberg, 'Konsroller i utbildning och arbete', p. 178. 48 Ibid., p. 163. 49 Widerberg, Kvinnor, klasser och lagar, p. 78. 50 Ibid., p. 80. 51 Baude and Holmberg, 'Konsroller i utbildning och arbete', pp. 172-3. 52 Ibid., p. 178. 53 Sarah Death: 'Pippi Langstrump and Anne of Green Gables: Tribute and Subversion', in Gunilla Anderman and Christine Baner (eds): Proceedings of the Tenth Biennial Conference for Teachers of Scandinavian Studies, 9-12 April 1995 (University of Surrey, Guildford, forthcoming). 54 Helena Forsas-Scott: 'Swedish "Literature of Preparedness" and Feminist Pacifism: The Example of Elin Wagner', in Janet Garton (ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Scandinavian Studies, 8—11 April 1991 (University of East Anglia, Norwich 1992) pp. 97-111. 55 Goran Palm: 'Elsa Graves poesi' ('The Poetry of Elsa Grave'), Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 26, 1957, p. 699. 56 Elsa Grave: Ariel (Bonniers, Stockholm 1955), pp. 180-1. 57 Lena Mattisson: 'I morkret har jag lattare for att skapa. En intervju med Elsa Grave' ('I Find it Easier to be Creative in the Dark. Interview with Elsa Grave'), Horisont, vol. 36, 1989, no. 5, p. 40. 58 Elsa Grave: Modrar som vargar (Norstedts, Stockholm 1972), p. 17. 59 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. VI, p. 165.

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60 Ulla Isaksson: Dit du icke vill (Bonniers, Stockholm 1956), pp. 111-12. 61 Berit Wilson: 'Contemporary Issues and Narrative Techniques in Ulla Isaksson's Paradistorg', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds): A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick (Norvik Press, Norwich 1994), pp. 253-66. 62 Ulla Isaksson: '"Att beratta om kvinnor pa kvinnors vis". Ulla Isaksson samtalar om sitt fb'rfattarskap med Ying Toijer-Nilsson' ('"Writing about Women in Women's Ways": Ulla Isaksson in Conversation about her Writing with Ying Toijer-Nilsson'), Hertha, vol. 62, 1975, no. 6, p. 8. CHAPTER 6 Karin Boye (1900-1941) 1 Margit Abenius: Drabbad av renhet. En bok om Karin Boyes liv och diktning (Stricken with Purity. A Book about the Life and Work of Karin Boye) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1950). 2 Erik Hjalmar Linder: Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet (Five Decades of the Twentieth Century) (2 vols, Natur & Kultur, Stockholm 1965-66), vol. II, p. 644. 3 Gunnar Brandell: Fran forsta vdrldskriget till 1950 (From the First World War to 1950) (Aldus, Stockholm 1974), p. 196, p. 197. 4 Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska Htteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. V, p. 40. 5 Gunilla Domellof: / oss ar en mangfald levande. Karin Boye som kritiker och prosamodernist (Within Us a Multiplicity is Alive. Karin Boye as a Critic and a Prose Modernist) (University of Umea, Umea 1986). 6 Abenius, Drabbad av renhet, p. 35. 7 The vast majority of Karin Boye's texts are quoted from her Samlade skrifter (Collected Works) (11 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1947-50). (55) This quotation is from 55, vol. X, pp. 34-5. 8 Abenius, Drabbad av renhet, p. 89. 9 55, vol. X, p. 31. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 53. 12 Phallogocentrism, a term coined by Jacques Derrida, denotes the conjuncture of phallocentrism and logocentrism. 13 Margaret Whitford: Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (Routledge, London and New York 1991), pp. 22-3. 14 Karin Boye: 'Spraket bortom logiken' ('The Language beyond Logic'), Spektrum, 1932, no. 6; reprinted in Karin Boye: Det hungriga ogat (The Hungry Eye), ed. Gunnar Stahl (Legus, Stockholm 1992), pp. 29-36. 15 Abenius, Drabbad av renhet, p. 133.

Notes

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

275

SS, vol. X, p. 88. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 127. Victor Svanberg: 'I rorelse' ('In Motion'), in Margit Abenius and Olof Lagercrantz (eds): Karin Boye. Minnen och studier (Karin Boye: Recollections and Studies) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1942), p. 20. Domellof, / oss dr en mdngfald levande, p. 155. SS, vol. I, pp. 12-13. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 121. Domellof, I oss dr en mdngfald levande, p. 179. Emile Durkheim: The Division of Labour in Society [1893], tr. George Simpson (Free Press, Macmillan, New York 1964), p. 169. Emile Durkheim: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life [1912], tr. Joseph Ward Swain, 2nd edn (Allen & Unwin, London 1976), p. 427. SS, vol. I, p. 20. SS, vol. IX, p. 211. Birgitta Svanberg: 'Fortryck och uppror. En analys av grundtematiken i Karin Boyes roman Kris' ('Oppression and Rebellion. An Analysis of the Central Themes in Karin Boye's Novel Crisis'), in Birgitta Paget et al. (eds): Kvinnor och skapande. En antologi om litteratur och konst tilldgnad Karin Westman Berg (Forfattarfbrlaget, Stockholm 1983), p. 221. Domellof, I oss dr en mdngfald levande, p. 223. SS, vol. Ill, p. 9. Ibid., p. 98. B. Svanberg, 'Fortryck och uppror', p. 222. SS, vol. Ill, p. 133. Domellof, I oss dr en mdngfald levande, p. 219. Ibid., p. 251. Abenius, Drabbad av renhet, p. 225. SS, vol. Ill, p. 160-1. Ibid., p. 208-9. Domellof, I oss dr en mdngfald levande, p. 228. SS, vol. Ill, p. 254-8. Abenius, Drabbad av renhet, pp. 256-63. Ibid., p. 289. SS, vol. X, p. 146. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 154.

276

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48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., p. 153. 50 Barbro Gustafsson: 'Framtidens ode land. Oswald Spengler, T.S. Eliot och Karin Boye' ('The Waste Land of the Future: Oswald Spengler, T.S. Eliot and Karin Boye'), Svensk littemturtidskrift, vol. 38, 1975, no. 3, p. 30. 51 Gunnar Ekelof: 'For Annie' [in Swedish], in Margit Abenius and Olof Lagercrantz (eds): Karin Boye. Minnen och studier (Bonniers, Stockholm 1942), p. 129. 52 Karin Boye: T.S. Eliots "The Waste Land'", Ord & Bild, vol. 45, 1936, p. 610. 53 SS, vol. V, p. 217. 54 Helena Forsas-Scott: '"Reading and Writing Our Own Tongue": The Examples of Elin Wagner and Karin Boye', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 9, 1986, no. 4, p. 359. 55 SS, vol. V, p. 29. 56 Ibid., p. 60-1. 57 Gunnar Ekelof: 'Kallocain', in Gunnar Ekelof: Blandade kort. Essder (Shuffled Cards. Essays) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1957), p. 100. 58 SS, vol. V, p. 137. 59 Forsas-Scott, '"Reading and Writing Our Own Tongue'", pp. 35960. 60 Ibid., p. 360. 61 SS, vol. V, p. 248-9. I am indebted to Linda Schenck for this translation. 62 Forsas-Scott, '"Reading and Writing Our Own Tongue'", p. 360. 63 55, vol. V, p. 253. 64 55, vol. XI, p. 56. CHAPTER 7 Moa Martinson (1890-1964) 1 See Eva Adolfsson: 'Drommen om badstranden. Kvinnobilder i trettitalslitteraturen, sarskilt hos Agnes von Krusenstjerna och Moa Martinson' ('The Dream of the Beach. Images of Women in Literature of the 1930s, especially in the Work of Agnes von Krusenstjerna and Moa Martinson'), in Birgitta Paget et al. (eds): Kvinnor och skapande. En antologi om litteratur och konst tillagnad Karin Westman Berg (Forfattarforlaget, Stockholm 1983). 2 Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: Moa Martinson. Skrift och drift i trettiotalet (Norstedts, Stockholm 1988), p. 144. 3 Erik Hjalmar Linder: Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet (Five Decades of the Twentieth Century) (2 vols, Natur & Kultur, Stockholm 1965-66), vol. II, p. 576, p. 583.

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4 Gunnar Brandell: Fran forsta vdrldskriget till 1950 (From the First World War to 1950) (Aldus, Stockholm 1974), p. 122. 5 Ibid., p. 123. 6 Ingemar Algulin: A History of Swedish Literature (Swedish Institute, Stockholm 1989), pp. 229-34, p. 198. 7 Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: '"Lita pa en karl, man skulle ha stryk!" Hela svenska folkets Moa — myten, manniskan och verket' ('"Trust a Man — You Ought to Get a Good Hiding!" Moa, The Favourite of the Swedish Nation — the Myth, the Person, and her Work'), in Eva Adolfsson et al.: Vardagsslit och drommars sprdk. Svenska proletdrforfattarinnor frdn Maria Sandel till Mary Andersson (Hammarstrom & Aberg, Enskede 1981), p. 110. 8 Maria Bergom-Larsson: 'Moa Martinson — arbetet och karleken' ('Moa Martinson - Work and Love'), in Kvinnomedvetande. Om kvinnobild, familj och klass i litteraturen (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1976), p. 72. 9 Ibid., p. 93. 10 Witt-Brattstrom, '"Lita pa en karl'", p. 133. 11 Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, pp. 46-50. 12 Moa Martinson: Jag moter en diktare (I Meet a Caulker), 3rd edn (Tidens fdrlag, Stockholm 1950), p. 333. 13 Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, pp. 67-80. 14 Witt-Brattstrom, '"Lita pa en karl'", pp. 138-9. 15 Moa Martinson: Women and Apple Trees, tr. Margaret S. Lacy (Women's Press, London 1987), p. 120. (WAT) 16 Moa Martinson4: 'Vad jag vill med mina bocker' ('What I Want with My Books'), in Erik Asklund et al., Avsikter. Arton forfattare om sina verk (Bonniers, Stockholm 1945), p. 156. 17 Moa Martinson: 'Hur jag blev forfattare' ('How I Became a Writer'), in Ivar Ohman (ed.): Mitt mote med boken. Tjugo svenska forfattare berdtta om sig sjdlva och sina backer (My Encounter with Literature. Twenty Swedish Writers Speak about Themselves and Their Books) (Folket i Bild, Stockholm 1943), p. 128. 18 Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, p. 116. 19 Ibid., p. 125.

20 WAT, p. 6. 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ibid., p. 11. Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, pp. 131-2. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 134. WAT, p. 134. Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, p. 128.

278 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Swedish Women's Writing WAT, pp. 75-6. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., pp. 127-8. Ibid., p. 126. Peter Brooks: Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative [1984] (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, and London 1992), p. 103. Moa Martinson: Rdgvakt (Bonniers, Stockholm 1935), p. 116. Moa Martinson: Drottning Grdgyllen (Tidens fb'rlag, Stockholm 1937), p. 157. Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, pp. 200-6, pp. 211-17. Bergom-Larsson, 'Moa Martinson', p. 84. Moa Martinson: Kyrkbrollop (Tidens forlag, Stockholm 1938), p. 197. (Kb) Witt-Brattstrom, Moa Martinson, pp. 230-3. Kb, p. 256. Moa Martinson: Morgiftersig (Bonniers, Stockholm 1936), p. 296. Ibid., p. 322. See Eva Adolfsson: 'Berattandets vag i Morgifter sig' ('The Narrative Path in Mother Gets Married') in I grdnsland. Essder om kvinnliga forfattarskap (Bonniers, Stockholm 1991). Moa Martinson: BrandHljor (Tidens forlag, Stockholm 1941), p. 190. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 391.

CHAPTER 8 Birgitta Trotzig (born 1929) 1 Bernt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin: Litteraturens historia i Sverige (Norstedts, Stockholm 1987), p. 521; Ulf Olsson: / de't lysande morkret. En Idsning av Birgitta Trotzigs De utsatta (In Darkness Illuminated. A Reading of Birgitta Trotzig's The Exposed) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1988), p. 7. 2 Birgitta Trotzig: 'Det sekulariserade Sverige: Det sakralas hemligheter' ('Secularised Sweden: The Secrets of the Sacred'), in Goran Therborn et al: Lycksalighetens halvo. Den svenska valfardsmodellen och Europa (FRN-Framtidsstudier, Stockholm 1987), pp. 91-2. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 92. 5 Birgitta Trotzig: 'Fran en ort till en annan' ('From One Place to Another'), Allt om backer, 1982, no. 1, p. 2. 6 Birgitta Trotzig: Jaget och vdrlden (The I and the World) (Forfattarfbrlaget, Stockholm 1977), p. 103. 7 Ibid., pp. 103-4.

Notes

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8 Agneta Pleijel: 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet. Ett samtal med Birgitta Trotzig' ('The Human Being,- Creation, Creativity. A Conversation with Birgitta Trotzig'), Ord & Bild, vol. 91, 1982, no. 1, p. 15. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 Trotzig, Jaget och varlden, p. 108. 12 Ibid., p. 109. 13 Ibid., p. 104. 14 Pleijel, 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet', p. 17. 15 Ibid., p. 12. 16 Trotzig, Jaget och varlden, p. 113. 17 Pleijel, 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet', p. 9. 18 Ibid., pp. 7-8. 19 Trotzig, Jaget och varlden, p. 114. 20 Ibid., p. 110. 21 Pleijel, 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet', pp. 4—5. 22 Ibid., p. 6. 23 Trotzig, Jaget och varlden, p. 113. 24 Ibid., p. 115. 25 Birgitta Trotzig: 'Varfor kallas mina bocker svarta? Verkligheten ar ju mycket varre' ('Why Are My Books Referred to as Black? Reality is Much Worse'), Vdr kyrka, 1973, no. 47, p. 7. 26 Trotzig, Jaget och varlden, p. 105. 27 Eva Adolfsson: 'Birgitta Trotzig: "I karleken, den dodliga skadan'" ('Birgitta Trotzig: "In Love, the Fatal Wound'"), in Igrdnsland. Essder om kvinnligaforfattarskap (Bonniers, Stockholm 1991), p. 133. 28 Pleijel, 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet', p. 4. 29 Olsson, / det lysande morkret, pp. 14—15. 30 Ibid., pp. 19-20. 31 Adolfsson, 'Birgitta Trotzig', p. 142. 32 Birgitta Trotzig: De utsatta. En legend (Bonniers, Stockholm 1957), p. 8. (DU) 33 DU, p. 27. 34 Adolfsson, 'Birgitta Trotzig', p. 140. 35 Birgitta Trotzig: Ett landskap. dagbok —fragment 54—58 (A Landscape. Diary - Fragment 54-58) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1959), p. 18. My italics. 36 Olsson, I det lysande morkret, p. 39. 37 DU, pp. 148-9. 38 Olsson, I det lysande morkret, p. 96. 39 DU, p. 153.

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40 Ibid., p. 188. 41 Olsson, / det lysande morkret, p. 34. 42 Carl Otto Werkelid: '"Spraket sprangs, spricker och fb'rgar." I Svenska Akademien vill Birgitta Trotzig bana vag for den experimentella litteraturen' ('"Language Breaks Apart, Cracks Up and Perishes." In the Swedish Academy Birgitta Trotzig Wants to Prepare the Way for Experimental Literature'), Svenska Dagbladet, 28 Nov. 1993. 43 Birgitta Trotzig: En berdttelse frdn kusten (Bonniers, Stockholm 1961), p. 60. 44 Ibid., p. 73. 45 Ibid., pp. 42-3. 46 Ibid., p. 159. 47 Birgitta Trotzig: 'Edith Sodergran', in Birgitta Trotzig: Portrait. Ur tidshistorien (Portraits. From Contemporary History) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1993), p. 80. 48 Ibid., pp. 80-1. 49 Gunilla Bergsten: 'Dod och panyttfbdelse. En aspekt av dysymboliken hos Birgitta Trotzig' ('Death and Rebirth. An Aspect of the Mud Symbolism in Birgitta Trotzig'), in Par Hellstrom and Tore Wreto (eds): Laskonst, skrivkonst, dikikonst. Aderton betraktelser over dikt och diktande jamte en bibliografi over Thure Stenstroms skrifter (Askelin & Hagglund, Stockholm 1987), p. 206. 50 Birgitta Trotzig: Sveket (Bonniers, Stockholm 1966), p. 9. 51 Ibid., p. 28. 52 Ibid., p. 71. 53 Birgitta Trotzig: Sjukdomen (Bonniers, Stockholm 1972), p. 8. (Sd) 54 Ibid., p. 85. 55 Ibid., p. 245. 56 Ibid., p. 158. 57 See Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: 'Modersabjekt och apokalyps. En lasning av Birgitta Trotzigs roman Sjukdomen' ('The Mother as Abject and Apocalypse. A Reading of Birgitta Trotzig's Novel The Disease'), in Lars Nylander (ed.): Litteratur och psykoanalys — en antologi om modern psykoanalytisk litteraturtolkning (Norstedts, Stockholm 1986). 58 Sd, p. 160. 59 Ibid., p. 167. 60 Ibid.,'p. 195. 61 Ibid., p. 233. 62 Ibid., p. 237. 63 Kjerstin Noren: 'Svarta bilder som betvingar morkret. Om Birgitta Trotzigs forfattarskap' ('Black Images that Conquer Darkness. On the Work of Birgitta Trotzig'), in Linjer i nordisk prosa. Sverige

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1965-1915 (Bo Cavefors bokforlag, Lund 1977), p. 425. 64 Karl Vennberg: 'Med ord ur smartans ordlosa dialekt. Om Birgitta Trotzigs Dykungens dotter' ('With Words from the Wordless Dialect of Pain. On Birgitta Trotzig's The. Marsh King's Daughter'), Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 54, 1985, no. 2, p. 142. 65 Ibid. 66 Birgitta Trotzig, text on dustcover of Dykungens dotter. En barnhistoria (Bonniers, Stockholm 1985). 67 Birgitta Trotzig: Dykungens dotter. En barnhistoria (Bonniers, Stockholm 1985), p. 205. 68 Ibid., p. 211. 69 Ibid., p. 226. 70 Ibid., p. 237. 71 Mona Vincent: 'Birgitta Trotzig's Ordgrdnser - ett tolkningsforslag' ('Birgitta Trotzig's Verbal Boundaries — Suggestions for an Interpretation'), Samlaren, vol. 92, 1971, p. 40. 72 Trotzig, Jaget och vdrlden, pp. 26—7. CHAPTER 9 New Generations at the Forefront 1 Stig Hadenius et al: Sverige efter 1900. En modern politisk historia (Sweden after 1900: A Modern Political History) llth edn (Bonniers, Stockholm 1988), p. 244. 2 Gunnar Tomqvist (ed.): Svenskt ndringsliv i geografiskt perspektiv (The Swedish Economy in a Geographical Perspective) (Liber forlag, Malmo 1986), p. 50. 3 Hadenius et al, Sverige efter 1900, p. 279. 4 Ibid., p. 287. 5 Klas Eklund: Vdr ekonomi. En introduktion till samhdllsekonomin (Our Economy. An Introduction to the National Economy) (Tidens forlag, Stockholm 1988), p. 243. 6 Eva Moberg: 'Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning' ('The Conditional Release of Woman') [1961], in Kvinnor och mdnniskor (Bonniers, Stockholm 1962), p. 108. 7 Edmund Dahlstrom et al.: Kvinnors liv och arbete. Svenska och norska studier av ett aktuellt samhdllsproblem (The Changing Roles of Men and Women), (Prisma, Stockholm 1968), p. 7. 8 Christina Jonung: 'Kvinnorna i svensk ekonomi' ('Women in the Swedish Economy'), in Bo Sodersten (ed.): Svensk ekonomi. Ett samlingsverk (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1982), p. 301; Paula Snyder: The European Women's Almanac (Scarlet Press, London 1992), p. 335; Sweden in Figures 1995 (Statistics Sweden, Stockholm 1995), p. 27.

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9 On Women and Men in Sweden and EC (Statistics Sweden, Stockholm 1992), p. 37. 10 Jonung, 'Kvinnorna i svensk ekonomi', p. 304; Snyder, The European Women's Almanac, p. 336. 11 Jonung, 'Kvinnorna i svensk ekonomi', p. 301, pp. 304—5. 12 Maud Eduards et al: 'Equality: How Equal? Public Equality Policies in the Nordic Countries', in Elina Haavio-Mannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics (Pergamon Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt 1985), p. 154. 13 'Equality between Men and Women in Sweden' (Fact Sheets on Sweden, Swedish Institute, Stockholm, Dec. 1994). 14 On Women and Men in Sweden and EC, p. 35. 15 Sirkka Sinkkonen: 'Women in Local Polities', in Elina HaavioMannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics (Pergamon Press, Oxford 1985), pp. 81-2. 16 On Women and Men in Sweden and EC, p. 39. 17 Snyder, The European Women's Almanac, p. 336. 18 Beatrice Halsaa et al.: 'Introduction', in Haavio-Mannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics, p. xviii. 19 Torild Skard and Elina Haavio-Mannila: 'Mobilization of Women at Elections', in Haavio-Mannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics, p. 40. 20 Ibid., p. 42, pp. 44-5. 21 Ibid., p. 42. 22 On Women and Men in Sweden and EC, p. 58. 23 Torild Skard and Elina Haavio-Mannila: 'Women in Parliament', in Haavio-Mannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics, p. 54. 24 Ibid., p. 78. 25 Eduards et al, 'Equality: How Equal?', p. 146. 26 'Equality between Men and Women in Sweden' fact sheet. 27 On Women and Men in Sweden and EC, p. 28. 28 'Equality between Men and Women in Sweden' fact sheet. 29 Ibid. 30 Drude Dahlerup and Brita Gulli: 'Women's Organisations in the Nordic Countries: Lack of Force or Counterforce?', in HaavioMannila et al. (eds): Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics, p. 31. 31 The summary in this paragraph is based on Helena Forsas-Scott: 'From Concept of Woman Studies to Gendered Texts: Feminist Literary Criticism in Sweden', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 18, 1995, no. 2, pp. 223-33. .

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32 Maud L. Eduards: 'The Swedish Gender Model: Productivity, Pragmatism and Paternalism', West European Politics, vol. 14, 1991, no. 3, p. 173. 33 Ibid., p. 174. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 176. 36 Ibid., p. 179. 37 Rolf Yrlid: Litteraturens villkor (The Conditions of Literature), 2nd edn (Studentlitteratur, Lund 1990), p. 78. 38 Karin Petherick: 'The Importance of Being Earnest. Values in the Swedish Book World', Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 July 1990, p. 18. 39 Yrlid, Litteraturens villkor, p. 28. 40 Ibid., p. 117. 41 Ibid., p. 138. 42 Bernt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin: Litteraturens historia i Sverige (Norstedts, Stockholm 1987), p. 540. 43 Ibid., p. 560. 44 Marielouise Samuelsson: 'Hon varnar ratten till ett inre rum' ('She Defends the Right to an Inner Room') [Interview], Svenska Dagbladet, 16 May 1992. 45 Elisabet Hermodsson: 'Forord' ('Preface') to Elisabet Hermodsson: Disa Nilssons visor. Visor om sommaren, samhdllet, mannen och universum (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1974), p. 10. 46 Maria Bergom-Larsson: 'De befriande myterna' ('The Liberating Myths'), in Maria Bergom-Larsson: Kvinnomedvetande. Om kvinnobild, familj och klass i litteraturen (Feminine Consciousness. On the Images of Women, on Family and Class in Literature) (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1976), p. 235. 47 Kristina Lugn: 'Fran vart Ma hus vid stranden', in Kristina Lugn: Lugn bara lugn, 2nd edn (Alba, Stockholm 1985), p. 78. 48 Goran Dahl: 'Efter allt kom intet och efter det kanske nagot. Forhallandet vetenskap-litteratur' ('After All Came Nothing and after This Perhaps Something: The Relationship between Philosophy and Literature'), in Madeleine Grive and Claes Wahlin (eds): Alt skriva sin tid. Nedslag in 80- och 90-talet (Writing Our Time. Explorations in the 80s and 90s) (Norstedts, Stockholm 1993), p. 68. 49 Patricia Waugh: Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (Routledge, London and New York 1989), p. 6. 50 Ibid., p. 13. 51 Ibid. 52 Margaretha Fahlgren: Det underordnade jaget. En studie om kvinnliga

284

53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60

61

62 63 64

65 66

Swedish Women's Writing sjdlvbiografter (The Subordinate Self. A Study of Autobiographies by Women) (Bokfbrlaget Jungfrun, Tullinge 1987), p. 167. Ibid., p. 164. Quoted in Peter Luthersson: 'JEva Runefelts framryckning' ('The Advance of Eva Runefelt'), in Lars Ellestrom and Cecilia Hansson (eds): Samtida. Essaer om svenskaforfattarskap (Contemporaries. Essays on Swedish Writers) (Alba, Stockholm 1990), p. 150. Mona Sandqvist: 'Att resa sorn Eva Strom' ('Travelling as Eva Strom'), in Lars Ellestrom and Cecilia Hansson (eds): Samtida. Essaer om svenskaforfattarskap (Alba, Stockholm 1990), p. 201. Ibid., p. 190. Marie Peterson: 'Ann Jaderlund: Dikterna ska irritera mig' ('Ann Jaderlund: I Want My Poems to Irritate Me'), in Bjorn Gunnarson (ed.): Forfattare i 80-talet (Writers of the 80s) (Symposion, Stockholm/ Lund 1988), p. 199. Maren Dunsby: 'Swedish Women Poets of the Eighties', Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1, p. 16. Irene Matthis and Ebba Witt-Brattstrom: 'En radikal kvinnlig negativitet' ('A Radical Feminine Negativity') [Interview], Divan, 1992, no. 5, p. 47. Marie Peterson: 'Katarina Frostenson: Platser ar sjalsavtryck' ('Katarina Frostenson: Places are Impressions of Souls'), in Bjorn Gunnarson (ed.), Forfattare i 80-talet (Writers of the 80s) (Symposion, Stockholm/ Lund, 1988), p. 191. S. M. Danius: 'Overenskommelsens grans. Nedslag i kvinnliga fbrfattarskap' ('The Border of Agreement. Explorations of the Work of Women Writers'), Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 56, 1987, no. 4, p. 268. Matthis and Witt-Brattstrom, 'En radikal kvinnlig negativitet', p. 47. Katarina Frostenson: 'Du', in Katarina Frostenson: Samtalet. Strdnderna. Joner (Wahlstrom & Widstrand, Stockholm 1992), p. 159; tr. Joan Tate, previously unpublished. Details of Las- och bokvanor ifem svenska samhdllen. Litteraturutredningens lasvanestudier (Reading and Book Habits in Five Swedish Communities. Studies of Reading Habits by the Literature Commission) (SOU 1972:20), summarised in Lisbeth Larsson: En annan historia. Om kvinnors lasning och svensk veckopress (A Different Story. On Women's Reading and Swedish Popular Weeklies) (Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 1989), p. 27. Ibid. Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7

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vqls, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. VI, p. 253. 67 Ibid., p. 246. 68 Ibid., p. 263. CHAPTER 10 Sara Lidman (bom 1923) 1 Frank-Michael Kirsch: 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', Weimarer Beitrage, vol. 28, 1982, no. 12, p. 28. 2 Birgitta Holm: 'Tur och retur fran Missentrask' ('From Missentrask and Back'), in Roster om Sara Lidman (Voices on Sara Lidman) (ABF Stockholm, Stockholm 1991), p. 10. 3 Carina Kallestal and Sverker Sorlin: 'Vreden som "lifsens rot". Sara Lidman interyjuas' ('Wrath as "The Root of Life". Interview with Sara Lidman', Bonniers litterdra magasin, p. 322. 4 Ibid. 5 'Sara Lidman', in Bo Heurling (ed.): Forfattaren sjalv (The Author Himself/Herself) (Wiken, Hoganas 1993), p. 205. 6 Elly Jannes: 'Den egentliga varlden var byn. Sara Lidman berattar om sin vag fran drom till verklighet' ('The True World Was the Village. Sara Lidman Talks about her Path from Dream to Reality'), Vi, 1959, no. 9, p. 15. 7 Willy R. Kastberg: 'Samtal med Sara Lidman' ('Conversation with Sara Lidman'), Ord & Bild, vol. 75, 1966, p. 533. 8 Kirsch, 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', p. 29. 9 'Enkat: "Vilka fb'rfattare eller vilken bok har haft en avgorande betydelse for er syn pa varlden i dag?'" ('Inquiry: "Which Authors or Which Book Have Had a Decisive Impact on Your Perspective on the World Today?'"), Bockernas vdrld, 1968, no. 6, p. 18. 10 Matts Rying: 'Det brinner en eld' ('A Fire is Burning') [Interview], Roster i radio, 1959, no. 4, p. 13. 11 Kirsch, 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', p. 29. 12 Sara Lidman: 'Brev fran andra stranden' ('Letter from the Other Side'), Dagens Nyheter, 12 Sept. 1973. 13 Kallestal and Sorlin, 'Vreden som "lifsens rot'", p. 324. 14 Sara Lidman with Odd Uhrbom (illustrations): Gruva [1968] 2nd edn (Aldus/Bonniers, Stockholm 1970), pp. 157-8. 15 Kirsch, 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', p. 31; Karl Erik Lagerlof: 'Sara Lidman om romanen "Din tjanare hor": "Jag vill lata marken beratta'" ('Sara Lidman on Her Novel Thy Servant Heareth: "I Want to Let the Ground Speak'"), Dagens Nyheter, 12 June 1983. 16 Sara Lidman: Tjdrdalen (Bonniers, Stockholm 1953), p. 162.

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17 Ibid., p. 148. 18 Kallestal and Sorlin, 'Vreden som "lifsens rot'", p. 323. 19 Sara Lidman: Hjortronlandet (Bonniers, Stockholm 1955), p. 112. 20 Elisabeth Tykesson: 'Fabel och argument' ('Story and Argument') [Interview], in Vdnkritik. 22 samtal om dikt tilldgnade Olle Holmberg (Friends as Critics. 22 Conversations on Literature in Honour of Olle Holmberg) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1959), p. 148. 21 Sara Lidman: Regnspiran (Bonniers, Stockholm 1958), p. 68. 22 Ibid., p. 173. 23 Ibid., p. 82. 24 Ibid., p. 9. 25 'Sara Lidman', in Bo Heurling (ed.), Forfattaren sjtilv, p. 204. 26 Sara Lidman: 'Vietnam ar samtidens universitet' ('Vietnam is the University of Our Time') [Interview], Vi, 1968, no. 7, p. 40. 27 Sara Lidman: Varje lov dr ett oga (Bonniers/Delfin, Stockholm 1980), p. 7. 28 Lidman, 'Brev fran andra stranden'. 29 Sara Lidman: Vdnner och u-vdnner (Bonniers, Stockholm 1969), pp. 10-12. 30 Gunnar Thorell: 'Samtal med Sara (fore gruvstrejken)' ('Conversation with Sara [Before the Miners' Strike]'), Ord & Bild, vol. 79, 1970, p. 36. 31 Kirsch, 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', pp. 29—30. 32 Ibid., p. 30. 33 Ibid. 34 Lidman, Varje lov dr ett oga, pp. 27—34, p. 130. 35 Ibid., p. 84. 36 Ibid., pp. 151-8, pp. 166-7. 37 Sara Lidman: Samtal i Hanoi, [1966] 2nd edn (Aldus/Bonniers, Stockholm 1971), p. 5. 38 Sara Lidman: Din tjdnare hor (Bonniers, Stockholm 1977), p. 65. (DTH) 39 Sara Lidman: Naboth's Stone, tr. Joan Tate (Norvik Press, Norwich 1989), pp. 51-2. 40 Sara Lidman: Vredens barn (Bonniers, Stockholm 1979), pp. 22—3. 41 DTH, p. 9. 42 Carolyn Merchant: The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, San Francisco 1980), p. 2.

43 DTH, p. 220. 44 Ibid., pp. 34-5. 45 Ibid., p. 167.

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46 Rying, 'Det brinner en eld', p. 43. CHAPTER 11 Kerstin Ekman (bom 1933) 1 Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, eds. Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott, is devoted to the work of Kerstin Ekman and contains articles as well as extracts in English translation from a range of her works. 2 Bernt Olsson and Ingemar Algulin: Littemturens historia i Sverige, p. 548; Lars Lonnroth and Sven Delblanc (eds): Den svenska litteraturen (7 vols, Bonniers, Stockholm 1987-90), vol. VI, pp. 172-5. 3 Marielouise Samuelsson: 'Hon varnar ratten till ett inre rum' ('She Defends the Right to an Inner Room'), Svenska Dagbladet, 16 May 1992. 4 Kerstin Ekman: 'Jag kanner mig som ett kolli' ('I Feel Like a Piece of Luggage'), Vi, 11 Oct. 1975, p. 23; my italics. 5 Kristina Hjerten: 'Samtal bm svensk litteratur. idag: Har vi en uppgift?' ('A Discussion about Swedish Literature Today: Do We Have a Role to Play?'), Allt om backer, 1987, nos. 7-8, p. 2; Monica Tunback-Hanson: 'Ett land av ljus och morker' ('Land of Light and Darkness'), Goteborgs-Posten, 8 July 1990. 6 Hjerten, 'Samtal om svensk litteratur idag', p. 5. 7 Bj0rn Bredal: 'Mord og m0dre/Murder and Mothers' [Interview], Nordisk litteratur, 1994, p. 7. 8 Samuelsson, 'Hon varnar ratten till ett inre rum'; Kerstin Ekman: 'Undret pa Malmskillnadsgatan. Om Selma Lagerlof, in Marie Louise Ramnefalk and Anna Westberg (eds): Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. I (Forfattarfbrlaget, Stockhokn 1981); Kerstin Ekman: 'Victoria Benedictssons arbete' ('The Work of Victoria Benedictsson'), in Lars Ardelius and Gunnar Rydstrbm (eds): Forfattarnas litteraturhistoria, vol. II (Forfattarfbrlaget, Stockholm 1978), pp. 101-8; Ake Lidzell: 'I akademien? Jag? Den dagen brbts stillheten kring diktarstugan' ('In the Academy? Me? The Day when the Peace around the Writer's Cottage Was Broken'), Dagens Nyheter, 25 April 1'978. 9 Samuelsson, 'Hon varnar ratten till ett inre rum'; Jean Bolinder: 'Jaktens Artemis ger oss aska, blixt och regn fran de norrlandska skogarna' ('Artemis of the Hunt Gives us Thunder, Lightning and Rain from the Forests of Norrland') [Interview], Tidningen Boken, 1988, no. 4, p. 12. 10 Lidzell, 'I akademien?'. 11 Ulf Ornkloo: 'Man maste sitta vid!' ('You Have to Sit Down and Get On with the Job') [Interview], Jury, vol. 19, 1990, no. 2, p. 5. 12 Samuelsson, 'Hon varnar ratten till ett inre rum'.

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13 Kerstin Ekman: Pukehornet (Bonniers, Stockholm 1967), p. 142. 14 Ulf Ornkloo: 'Man maste sitta vid!', p. 10. 15 Kerstin Ekman: Marker och bldbarsris (Bonniers, Stockholm 1972), p. 19. 16 Ekman: 'Undret pa Malmskillnadsgatan', p. 231. 17 Sarah Death: '"They Can't Do This to Time": Women's and Men's Time''in Kerstin Ekrnan's Anglahusef, in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds): A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour ofKarin Petherick (Norvik Press, Norwich 1994), p. 273. 18 Kerstin Ekman: Hdxringarna (Magic Circles) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1974), p. 7. (Hr) 19 Ibid., p. 7; Kerstin Ekman: 'Selection from The Witches' Circles', tr. Linda Schenck, p. 75. 20 Kerstin Ekman, 'From The Spring', tr. Sarah Death, Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, p. 41. 21 Death, '"They Can't Do This to Time'", p. 269. 22 Hr, p. 125. 23 Kerstin Ekman: Anglahuset (Bonniers, Stockholm 1979), p. 199. (Ah). Translation partly my own, partly that of Joan Tate in Kerstin Ekman: 'Obsessed by Society', tr. Joan Tate, Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, p. 82. 24 Anna Maria Hagerfors: 'Kerstin Ekman till dagens kvinnor: Vanj er inte — gor motstand!' ('Kerstin Ekman to Today's Women: Don't Accept - Resist!'), Dagens Nyheter, 18 April 1979. 25 Anna Williams: 'Arbete och liv. Kvinnors verk i Kerstin Ekmans romaner' ('Work and Life. The Labour of Women in the Novels of Kerstin Ekman'), in Roster om Kerstin Ekman (ABF Stockholm, Stockholm 1993), p. 51. 26 Hr, p. 68. 27 Ibid., p. 188. 28 Kerstin Ekman: Springkallan (Bonniers, Stockholm 1976), pp. 10—11. 29 Ibid., p. 233.

30 Ah, pp. 9, 6. 31 32 33 34 35

Ibid., pp. 260-2. Ibid., pp. 37-8. Ibid., pp. 84-6. Ibid., pp. 101-9. Kerstin Ekman: En stad av ljus (Bonniers, Stockholm 1983), p. 474. (SL) 36 Ibid., pp. 143-4. 37 Ibid., p. 184. 38 Ibid., p. 106.

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39 Rochelle "Wright: 'Theme, Imagery and Narrative Perspective in Kerstin Ekman's En stad av ljus', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 59, 1987, no. 1, p. 9. 40 Ibid., p. 8. 41 Maria Schottenius: Den kvinnliga hemligheten. En studie i Kerstin Ekmans berattarkonst (The Female Secret: A Study in the Narrative Art of Kerstin Ekman) (Bonniers, Stockholm 1992), pp. 123-226. 42 SL, pp. 393-409. 43 Ibid., pp. 453-6. 44 Ibid., p. 139. 45 Ibid., p. 8. 46 Berit Gullberg: 'Kerstin Ekman, ett vittert fruntimmer: Stor med orden' ('Kerstin Ekman, Big on Words'), MagaZenit (Forsakringsbolaget SPP), 1990, no. 2, p. 50. 47 Maria Schottenius: 'Skogen, ordet och tystnaden. Om Kerstin Ekmans Rovarna i Skuleskogen' ('Forest, Word and Silence. On Kerstin Ekman's The Robbers of Skule Forest'), Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 57, 1988, no. 6, p. 428, note 38. 48 Kerstin Ekman: Rovarna i Skuleskogen (Bonniers, Stockholm 1988), p. 10. (RS) 49 See Rochelle Wright: 'Androgyny and Psychic Integration in The Robbers in Skule Forest', Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 50 RS, p. 25. 51 Ibid., p. 106. 52 Ibid., p. 107. 53 Ibid., p. 131. 54 Schottenius, 'Skogen, ordet och tystnaden', p. 427. 55 RS, p. 258. 56 Ibid., p. 376. 57 Kerstin Ekman: 'From Knivkastarens kvinna / The Knife-Thrower's Woman', tr. Rose-Marie Oster, Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, p. 58. 58 Kerstin Ekman: Knivkastarens kvinna (Bonniers, Stockholm 1990), p. 43. 59 Anders Palm: 'Om konsten att forvandla — reflexion over Knivkastarens kvinna' ('On the Art of Transformation — Reflections on The Knife-Thrower's Woman'), in Roster om Kerstin Ekman (ABF, Stockholm 1993), pp. 30-43. 60 Kerstin Ekman: Blackwater, tr. Joan Tate (Chatto & Windus, London 1995), pp. 124—5. I have replaced 'collapsed' in Joan Tate's translation with 'collapsing' as this comes closer to the original. 61 Ibid., p. 251.

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62 Kerstin Ekman: 'Obsessed by Society', pp. 87—8. 63 Leena Valtonen: 'Lappar pa ett lakan. Sa fbds Kerstin Ekmans romaner' ('Notes on a Bedsheet. The Birth of Kerstin Ekman's Novels') [Interview], ICA-Kuriren, 13 Oct. 1993, p. 4. 64 Tunback-Hanson, 'Ett land av ljus och morker'. 65 Ekman, 'Obsessed by Society', p. 88. CHAPTER 12 Experimentation and Innovation 1 Sonja Akesson: from 'What Does Your Color Red Look Like?', tr. Anselm Hollo, in Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo (eds): Modern Swedish Poetry in Translation (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1979), p. 31. 2 Eva Lilja: Den dubbla tungan. En studie i Sonja Akessons poesi (The Double Tongue. A Study of the Poetry of Sonja Akesson) (Daidalos, Gothenburg 1991), pp. 34-6. 3 Ibid., p. 38. 4 Kristina Lugn: 'Manniskan fods skyldig. Sonja Akesson' ('The Human Being is Born Guilty. Sonja Akesson'), in Ingrid Holmquist and Ebba Witt-Brattstrb'm (eds): Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. II (Forfattarfbrlaget, Stockholm 1983), p. 330. 5 Sonja Akesson: from 'Be White Man's Slave', tr. Richard B. Vowles, in Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar (eds): The Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women i875—1975 (Longman, New York and London 1989), p. 738. 6 Lilja, Den dubbla tungan, p. 40. 7 Sonja Akesson: 'Det fbrkrympta kvinnoidealet' ('The Stunted Ideal of Woman') [Review], Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 35, 1966, no. 5, pp. 385-7. 8 Sonja Akesson: from 'Brudlat fran Jakobsberg (kampsang)' (in Hastens oga, 1977), in Sonja Akesson: Dikter (En bok for alla/Raben Prisma, Stockholm 1994), p. 491. 9 Lilja, Den dubbla tungan, p. 141, pp. 155—7. 10 Sonja Akesson: from 'Forsamling' (in Husfrid, 1963), in Akesson, Dikter, p. 143. 11 Lugn, 'Manniskan fods skyldig', p. 336. 12 Sonja Akesson: from 'Julrakning' (in Jag bor i Sverige, 1966), in Akesson, Dikter, p. 254. 13 Sonja Akesson: from 'Sjalvbiografi' (in Husfrid, 1963), in Akesson, Dikter, p. 146. 14 Ibid., p. 152. 15 The summary in this paragraph is based on Lilja, Den dubbla tungan, pp. 19-28.

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16 Gustaf-Adolf Mannberg: 'Sonja, ha'r sitter vi och blir intervjuade' ('Sonja, Here We Are Being Interviewed'), in Gustaf-Adolf Mannberg: Samtal med forfattare (Conversations with Authors) (Raben & Sjogren, Stockholm 1971), p. 46. 17 Per Svensson: 'Hon skapar romankonst av sin familjs historia' ('She Is Turning the History of her Family into a Novel') [Interview], Tidningen Boken, 1988, no. 1, p. 27. 18 Annika Berg: 'Agneta Pleijel, kritiker, dramatiker, lyriker: All konst handlar ytterst om moral' ('Agneta Pleijel, Critic, Playwright, Poet: In the Last Analysis, All Art Is about Ethics') [Interview], Dagens Nyheter, 22 May 1981. 19 Agneta Pleijel: from Anglar, dvargar (Norstedts, Stockholm [1981] 1991), p. 49; tr. Joan Tate, previously unpublished. 20 Ibid., p. 62; tr. Joan Tate, previously unpublished. 21 Berg, 'Agneta Pleijel'. 22 Agneta Pleijel: 'Tidsbakgrund, text' ('Historical Background, Text'), in Agneta Pleijel: Kollontaj (Norstedts, Stockholm 1979), pp. 126-8. 23 Agneta Pleijel: Vindspejare. Boken om Abel Mdlaren (Norstedts, Stockholm 1987), p. 18. 24 Ibid., p. 416. 25 Ibid., pp. 51-2. 26 Agneta Pleijel: 'Agneta Pleijel', in Goran Skogsberg (ed.): En roman av . . . (En bok for alia, Stockholm 1994), p. 139. 27 Agneta Pleijel: Hundstjdrnan (Norstedts, Stockholm 1989), p. 196. 28 Ibid., p. 118. ~ 29 Agneta Pleijel: Fungi. En roman om karleken (Norstedts, Stockholm 1993), p. 302. 30 Mare Kandre: Aliide, Aliide (Bonniers, Stockholm 1991), pp. 25-6. (At) 31 Marie Kennedy: 'Mare Kandre - tror pa orden som berusar' ('Mare Kandre: She Believes in the Words that Intoxicate') [Interview], Goteborgs-Posten Aveny, 3-9 July 1992. 32 Gunilla Bjarsdal: review of Mare Kandre: Bebddelsen, Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 56, 1987, no. 1, p. 62. 33 Mare Kandre: Bttbins unge (Bonniers, Stockholm 1987), p. 74. 34 Ibid., p. 110. 35 Al, pp. 185-6. 36 Ibid., pp. 198-205. 37 Ibid., p. 225. 38 Kennedy, 'Mare Kandre'. 39 Mare Kandre: Quinnan och Dr Dreuf (Bonniers, Stockholm 1994), p. 83.

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40 Ibid., p. 144, p. 147. CONCLUSIONS 1 Selma Lagerlof: 'En saga om en saga' ('A Story about a Story'), in Selrna Lagerlof: En saga om en saga och andra sagor [1908] (Bonniers, Stockholm 1953), p. 9. 2 Kerstin Ekman: 'LJndret pa Malmskillnadsgatan', in Marie Louise Ramnefalk and Anna Westberg (eds): Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria (Forfattarforlaget, Stoclcholm 1981), vol. I, p. 232. 3 Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Virago, London 1978), p. 13. 4 Ibid. 5 Kerstin Ekman: En stad av ljus (Bonniers, Stockholm 1983), p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 484.

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Utbildningsradion, 1992, pp. 203-18. Jonung, Christina, 'Kvinnorna i svensk ekonomi', in Bo Sodersten (ed.), Svensk ekonomi. Ett samlingsverk [1970]. 3rd rev. edn, Raben & Sjogren, 1982, pp. 298-317. Kellgren, Ragna (ed.), Kvinnorna i politiken. Artiklar ur den politiska, mdikala veckotidningen Tidevarvet (1923-1936). LTs fbrlag, 1971. Key, Ellen, Barnets drhundmde. 2 vols, Bonniers, 1900. Eng. tr. The Century of the Child. Putnam's, New York and London 1909. Kvinnororelsen. Bonniers, 1909. Eng. tr. The Woman Movement, tr. Mamah Bouton Borthwick. Putnam's, New York 1912. Karleken och dktenskapet. 2 vols, Bonniers, 1911. Eng. tr. Love and Marriage, tr. Arthur G. Chater. Putnam's, New York and London 1911. Koblik, Steven (ed.), Fran fattigdom till overflod. En antologi om Sverigefrdn frihetstiden till vdra dagar. "Wahlstronr & Widstrand, 1973. Eng. tr. Sweden's Development from Poverty to Affluence 1750-1970, tr. Joanne Johnson. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1975. Kyle, Gunhild (ed.), Handbok i svensk kvinnohistoria. Carlssons, 1987. Larson, Margareta, De arbetade for fred. Kvinnofb'reningar i Sverige medfred pa sitt program 1898—1940. Forfattares bokmaskin, 1985. Liljestrom, Rita, 'Sweden: Similarity, Singularity, and Sisterhood', in Robin Morgan (ed.), Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology [1984]. Penguin, Harmondsworth 1985, pp. 664-9. Lindholm, Margareta, Talet om del kvinnliga. Studier ifeministiskt tankande i Sverige under 1930-talet. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 1990. Losman, Beata, Kamp for ett nytt kvinnoliv. Ellen Keys ideer och deras betydelse for sekelskiftets unga kvinnor. Liber fbrlag, 1980. 'Kvinnoorganisering och kvinnororelser i Sverige', in Gunhild Kyle (ed.), Handbok i svensk kvinnohistoria. Carlssons, 1987, pp. 195—225. Moberg, Eva, 'Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning' [1961], in Eva Moberg, Kvinnor och ma'nniskor. Bonniers, 1962, pp. 105—21. Myrdal, Alva, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experience in Democratic Family and Population Policy. Kegan Paul, French, Trubner, London 1945. Myrdal, Alva and Klein, Viola, Women's Two Roles: Home and Work. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1956. Qvist, Gunnar, Konsten att blifva en god flicka. Kvinnohistoriska uppsatser. Liber fdrlag, 1978. Scobbie, Irene, Sweden. Ernest Benn, London 1972. Scott, Franklin D., Sweden: The Nation's History. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1977.

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SWEDISH LITERARY HISTORY AND THEORY Adolfsson, Eva, I grdnsland. Essder om kvinnliga forfattarskap. Bonniers, 1991. Adolfsson, Eva et al., Vardagsslit och drommars sprdk. Svenska proletdrforfattarinnorfrdn Maria Sandel till Mary Andersson. Hammarstrom & Aberg, Enskede 1981. Romantikens kvinnor. Studier i det tidiga 1800-talets litteratur. Hammarstrom & Aberg, Johanneshov 1990. Algulin, Ingemar, A History of Swedish Literature. Swedish Institute, 1989. Ardelius, Lars and Rydstrom, Gunnar (eds), Forfattarnas litteraturhistoria. 3 vols, Forfattarfbrlaget, 1977-78. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, Kvinnomedvetande. Om kvinnobild, familj och klass i litteraturen. Raben & Sjogren, 1976. Bjorck, StafFan, Romanensformvdrld [1953]. Natur & Kultur, 1968. Boethius, Ulf, Strindberg och kvinnofrdgan till och med Giftas I. Prisma, 1969. Borgstrom, Eva, 'Om jag far be om olost.' Kring kvinnliga forfattares kvinnobilder i svensk romantik. Anamma forlag, Gothenburg 1991. Brandell, Gunnar, Fran 1870 tillforsta vdrldskriget, vol. I of Svensk litteratur 1870-1970. Aldus, 1974. Frdnforsta vdrldskriget till 1950, vol. II of Svensk litteratur 1870-1970. Aldus, 1975. Death, Sarah and Forsas-Scott, Helena (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994.

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Domellof, Gunilla et al, 'Fran kvinnolitteraturforskning till feministisk litteraturforskning', Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, vol. 15, 1994, no. 1, pp. 94-103. Ellestrom, Lars and Hansson, Cecilia (eds), Samtida. Essaer om svenska forfattarskap. Alba, 1990. Fahlgren, Margaretha, Det underordnade jaget. En studie om kvinnliga sjdlvbiogmfier. Bokfbrlaget Jungfrun, Tullinge 1987. Kvinnans ekvation. Kon, makt och rationalitet i Strindbergs forfattarskap. Carlssons, 1994. Forsas-Scott, Helena, 'Egalitarianisni and Feminine Consciousness: Feminist Writing in Scandinavia', in Helena Forsas-Scott (ed.): Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century. Routledge, London and New York 1991, pp. 39-73. 'From Concept of Woman Studies to Gendered Texts: Feminist Literary Criticism in Sweden', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 18, 1995, no. 2, pp. 223-33. Grive, Madeleine and Wahlin, Claes (eds), Att skriva sin tid. Nedslag i 80- och 90-talet. Norstedts, 1993. Gustafson, Alrik, A History of Swedish Literature. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1961. Heggestad, Eva, Fdngen ochfri. 1880-talets svenska kvinnliga forfattare om hemmet, yrkeslivet och konstnarskapet. Uppsala University, Uppsala 1991. Holmquist, Ingrid and Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba (eds), Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. II, Forfattarfb'rlaget, 1983. Hornstrom, Marianne, Flyktlinjer. Aningar kring sprdket och kvinnan. Brutus Ostlings bokfb'rlag Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 1994. Lamberth, Pia, 'Som ensamma fyrar i natten? En framst kvantitativ undersokning av kvinnliga svensksprakiga forfattares aktivitet 1900— 1949', Tidskrift for litteraturvetenskap, vol. 20, 1991, no. 3, pp. 31-42. Larsson, Lisbeth, En annan historia. Om kvinnors lasning och svensk veckopress. Symposion, Stockholm/Stehag 1989. Leffler, Yvonne, 'Den kvinnliga publiken och de kvinnliga forfattarnas betydelse for romanens genombrott i Norden', Nordica, vol. 8, 1991, pp. 237-49. Linder, Erik Hjalmar, Fern decennier av nittonhundratalet. 2 vols, Natur & Kultur, 1^65-66. Lonnroth, Lars and Delblanc, Sven (eds), Den svenska litteraturen, vols I-VI, Bonniers, 1987-89. Lonnroth, Lars and Goransson, Sverker (eds), Den svenska litteraturen, vol. VI, Bonniers, 1990. Lonnroth, Lars and Johannesson, Hans-Erik (eds), Den svenska litteraturen, vol. VII, Bonniers, 1990.

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Marker, Frederick J. and Marker, Lise-Lone, The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History. BlackweU, Oxford 1975. Mawby, Janet, 'The Inadequacy of Literature: Jan Myrdal and Sara Lidman', in Janet Mawby, Writers and Politics in Modem Scandinavia. Hodder and Stoughton, London, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto 1978, pp. 42-9. M011er Jensen, Elisabeth (ed.), Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria, Vols I, II -, Bra Bocker, Hoganas 1993-. Olsson, Bengt and Algulin, Ingemar, Litteraturens historia i Sverige. Norstedts, 1987. Paget, Birgitta et al. (eds), Kvinnor och skapande. En antologi om litteratur och konst tilldgnad Karin Westman Berg. Forfattarforlaget, 1983. Ramnefalk, Marie Louise and Westberg, Anna (eds), Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. I. Forfattarforlaget, 1981. Register, Chen, Kvinnokamp och litteratur i USA och Sverige. Raben & Sjogren, 1977. Rev. tr. of 'Feminist Ideology and Literary Criticism in the United States and Sweden'. PhD thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago 1973. Scobbie, Irene (ed.), Aspects of Modern Swedish Literature. Norvik Press, Norwich 1988. Sjogren, Henrik, Stage and Society in Sweden. Aspects of Swedish Theatre since 1945, tr. Paul Britten Austin. Swedish Institute, Stockholm 1979. Stenkvist, Jan, Den nyaste litteraturen, vol. Ill ofSvensk litteratur 1870-1970. Aldus, 1975. Tigerstedt, E.N., Ny illustrerad svensk litteraturhistoria. 4 vols, Natur & Kultur, 1967. Westman Berg, Karin (ed.), Konsroller i litteraturen frdn antiken till 1960talet. Prisma, 1968. Westman Berg, Karin, 'Kvinnolitteraturforskning. Enutvecklingshistoria', in Ann-Sofie Kalvemark (ed.), Stick i stdv med vedertagna normer. Kvinnoforskningoch kvinnojournalistik. Riksbankensjubileumsfond, 1982, pp. 71-90. Westman Berg, Karin and Ahmansson, Gabriella (eds), Teorier och begynnelser, vol. I of Kvinnolitteraturforskning.Kvinnolitteraturpr University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1979. Mothers, Saviours, Peacemakers: Swedish Women Writers in the Twentieth Century, vol. IV of Kvinnolitteraturforskning. Kvinnolitteraturprojektet, University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1983. Westman Berg, Karin et al. (eds), Text-tolkning-vdrdeting, vol. Ill of Kvinnolitteraturforskning, Kvinnolitteraturprojektet, University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1981.

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Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba, Ur konets marker. Litteraturanalyser. Norstedts, 1993. Yrlid, Rolf, Litteraturens villkor [1984]. 2nd edn, Studentlitteratur, Lund 1990. Zuck, Virpi (ed.), Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut 1990.

STUDIES OF INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS Fredrika Bremer Adlersparre, S. L-D. and Leijonhufvud, Sigrid, Fredrika Bremer: Biografisk studie. 2 vols, Norstedts, 1896. Asmundsson, Doris R., 'Fredrika Bremer: Sweden's First Feminist', in Avriel H. Goldberger (ed.), Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Greenwood Press, New York, Westport, Connecticut and London 1987, pp. 99-109. Axberger, Gunnar, Jaget och skuggorna. Fredrika Bremer-studier. Hugo Gebers fdrlag, 1951. Carsten Monten, Karin, 'Mytiska monster i Hertha', in Birgitta Holm (ed.), Fredrika Bremer ute och hemma. Uppsala University, Uppsala 1987, pp. 26-41. Death, Sarah, 'The Female Perspective in the Novels of Fredrika Bremer and Elin Wagner: A Comparative Study of Some Central Themes'. PhD thesis, University of London, 1985. 'Systerskap och syskonliv i Fredrika Bremers romaner', in Birgitta Holm (ed.), Fredrika Bremer ute och hemma. Uppsala University, Uppsala 1987, pp. 15-25. Holm, Birgitta, 'Lokes gift. Om tva historiedramer: Fredrika Bremers Tralinnan och J. J. Wecksells Daniel Hjort', in Dag Nordmark (ed.), Sdttstycken och stickrepliker. Drama och teaterstudier tilldgnade Sverker Ek pa 50-drsdagen 19 januari 1980. University of Umea, Umea 1980, pp. 27-44. Fredrika Bremer och den borgerliga romanensfodelse. Norstedts, 1981. Holm, Birgitta (ed.), Fredrika Bremer ute och hemma. University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1987. Howitt, Margaret, Twelve Months with Fredrika Bremer in Sweden. 2 vols, Jackson, Walford and Hodder, London 1866. Qvist, Gunnar, Fredrika Bremer och kvinnans emancipation. Opinionshistoriska studier. Scandinavian University Press, Akademifbrlaget, Gothenburg 1969. Stendahl, Brita K., The Education of a Self-Made Woman: Fredrika Bremer

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Ahlstrom, Gunnar, Kring Gosta Berlings saga. Natur & Kultur, 1959. Berendsohn, Walter A., Selma Lagerlof: Her Life and Work [1927], tr. George F. Timpson. Nicholson & Watson, London 1931. Budd, John, 'Selma Lagerlof, in John Budd: Eight Scandinavian Novelists: Criticism and Reviews in English. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London 1981, pp. 17-39. Edstrom, Vivi, Livets stigar. Tiden, handlingen och livskdnslan i Gosta Berlings saga. Sveiiska Bokfbrlaget/Norstedts, 1960. 'Att finna stilen. En studie ijemsalems framvaxt', in Lagerlofstudier, vol.4, 1971, pp. 7-32. Selma Lagerlof. Twayne, Boston 1984. Selma Lagerlofs litterara profil. Raben & Sjogren, 1986. 'I Write Like a Child: The Naive Code i Gosta Berlings saga', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 15-30. Ek, Bengt, Selma Lagerlof efter Gosta Berlings saga. En studie over genombrottsaren 1891-1897. Bonniers, 1951. Ekman, Kerstin, 'Undret pa Malmskillnadsgatan. Om Selma Lagerlof, in Marie Louise Ramnefalk and Anna Westberg (eds), Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. I. Forfattarforlaget, 1981, pp. 228—43. Forsas-Scott, Helena, 'Selma Lagerlofs "Astrid": Textual Strategy and Feminine Identity', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 63-74. Graves, Peter, 'Selma Lagerlofs "De fagelfrie": The Divide between the Seen and the Spoken', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 51-62.

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Green, Brita, 'The Warp and Weft of Selma Lagerlofs Narrative Fabric', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour ofKarin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 75-90. Gustafson, Alrik, 'Saga and Legend of a Province: Selma Lagerlof, in Alrik Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists [1940]. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1966, pp. 177—225. Holm, Birgitta, Selma Lagerlof och ursprungets roman. Norstedts, 1984. Lagerroth, Erland, Landskap och natur i Gosta Berlings saga och Nils Holgersson. Bonniers, 1958. Selma Lagerlof och Bohuslan. En studie i hennes 90-talsdiktning. Gleerups, Lund 1963. 'Selma Lagerlof Research 1900-1964: A Survey and an Orientation', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 37, 1965, no. 1, pp. 1—30. Selma Lagerlqfs Jerusalem. Revolutiondr sekterism mot fddernedrvd bondeordning. Gleerups, Lund 1966. Lagerroth, Ulla-Britta, Korkarlen och Bannlyst. Motiv- och idestudier i Selma Lagerlqfs 10-talsdiktning. Bonniers, 1963. Nylander, Lars T., 'Psychologism and the Novel. The Case of Selma Lagerlof s Gosta Berlings saga', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 67, 1995, no. 4, pp. 407-33. Olson-Buckner, Elsa, The Epic Tradition in Gosta Berlings Saga. Theodore Gaus, Brooklyn, New York 1978. Register, Cheri, 'The Sacrificial Hera: Selma Lagerlofs The Treasure as Feminist Myth', in Karin Westman Berg and Gabriella Ahmansson (eds), Mothers-Saviours-Peacemakers: Swedish Women Writers in the Twentieth Century, vol. IV of Kvinnolitteraturforskning. Kvinnolitteraturprojektet, University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1983, pp. 29-73. St. Andrews, Bonnie, 'Selma Lagerlofs The Treasure: Ancient Ethics', in Bonnie St. Andrews, Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlof, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood. Whitston, Troy, New York 1986, pp. 58-83. Schenck, Linda, 'Afterword', in Selma Lagerlof, The Lowenskold Ring, tr. Linda Schenck. Norvik Press, Norwich 1991, pp. 105-17. 'What or Who is Banished in Selma Lagerlofs Bannlyst?', in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour of Karin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 110-18. Torpe, Ulla, 'Den vedervardiga kvinnan fran Korskyrka. Om en romanfigur hos Selma Lagerlof, in Ingrid Holmquist and Ebba WittBrattstrom (eds), Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. II. Forfattarforlaget,

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Elin Wagner Alving, Barbro, 'Det kvinnliga samvetet. Anteckningar kring Elin Wagners mote med Fredrika Bremer', in Monica Boethius (ed.), Kvinnovarld i vardande. Fredrika Bremer-forbundet, 1959, pp. 193-206. 'Fran Pennskaft till Vackarklocka. Rostrattskamp och modraauktoritet hos Elin Wagner', in Karin Westman Berg (ed.), Konsroller i litteraturenfrdn antiken till 1960-talet. Prisma, 1968, pp. 123-39. Boye, Karin, 'Elin Wagner. En oversikt', Ord & Bild, vol. 45, 1936, pp. 415—26. Reprinted in Karin Boye, Det hungriga ogat, ed. Gunnar Stahl. Legus forlag, 1992, pp. 127-45. Death, Sarah, 'Sexual Politics and the Defeat of Sisterhood in Elin Wagner's Slakten Jerneploogs framgang (The Rise of the House of Jerneploog)', in Karin Westman Berg and Gabriella Ahmansson (eds), Mothers-Saviours-Peacemakers: Swedish Women Writers in the Twentieth Century, vol. IV of Kvinnolitteraturforskning. Kvinnolitteraturprojektet, University of Uppsala, Uppsala 1983, pp. 125-44. 'The Female Perspective in the Novels of Fredrika Bremer and Elin Wagner: A Comparative Study of Some Central Themes'. PhD thesis, University of London, 1985. 'The Sleeping Fury: Symbol and Metaphor in Elin Wagner's Silverforsen , Scandinavica, vol. 24, 1985, no. 2, pp. 183-95. Forsas-Scott, Helena, '"En kvinnas sjalvbiografi". Om Elin Wagners romankonst', Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, vol. 6, 1985, no. 3, pp. 3-16. 'Bibeln, kvinnan och romanen. En studie av Elin Wagners Asa-Hanna', Samlaren, vol. 107, 1986, pp. 35-57. '"Reading and Writing Our Own Tongue": The Examples of Elin Wagner and Karin Boye', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 9, 1986, no. 4, pp. 355-61. 'Swedish "Literature of Preparedness" and Feminist Pacifism: The Example of Elin Wagner', in Janet Garton (ed.), Proceedings of the

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Karin Boye Abenius, Margit, Drabbad av renhet. En bok om Karin Boyes liv och diktning. Bonniers, 1950. Abenius, Margit and Lagercrantz, Olof (eds), Karin Boye. Minnen och studier. Bonniers, .1942. Domellof, Gunilla, I oss a'r en mdngfald levande. Karin Boye som kritiker och prosamodernist. University of Umea, Umea 1986. 'Den erotiska frigorelsen: Karin Boyes roman "Kris'", Kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift, vol. 16, 1995, no. 4, pp. 37-46. Forsas-Scott, Helena, '"Reading and Writing Our Own Tongue": The Examples of Elin Wagner and Karin Boye', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 9, 1986, no. 4, pp. 355-61. Lagercrantz, Olof, '"Min stackars unge, min morkradda"', in Olof Lagercrantz: Svenska lyriker. Wahlstrom & Widstrand, 1961, pp. 161-85. Svanberg, Birgitta, 'Langtan efter moderliga man. Konsrollsattityder hos Karin Boye', in Karin Westman Berg (ed.), Konsroller i litteraturen frdn antiken till 1960-talet. Prisma, 1968, pp. 168-88. 'Fortryck och uppror. En analys av grundtematiken i Karin Boyes roman Kris', in Birgitta Paget et al. (eds), Kvinnor och skapande. En antologi om litteratur och konst tillagnad Karin Westman Berg. Forfattarforlaget, 1983, pp. 220-34.

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Moa Martinson Adolfsson, Eva, 'Drommen orn badstranden. Kvinnobilder i trettitalslitteraturen, sarskilt hos Agnes von Krusenstjerna och Moa Martinson', in Birgitta Paget et al. (eds), Kvinnor och skapande. En antologi om litteratur och konst tilTdgnad Karin Westman Berg. Forfattarfb'rlaget, 1983, pp. 207-19. 'Berattandets vag i Morgifter sig', in Eva Adolfsson: I grdnsland. Essaer om kvinnligaforfattarskap. Bonniers, 1991, pp. 63-106. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, 'Moa Martinson — arbetet och karleken', in Maria Bergom-Larsson, Kvinnomedvetande. Om kvinnobild, familj och klass i litteraturen, Raben & Sjogren, 1976, pp. 72—97. Martinson, Moa, 'Vad jag vill med mina bocker', in Erik Asklund et al., Avsikter. Artonforfattare om sina verk. Bonniers, 1945, pp. 149—56. Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba, '"Lita pa en karl, man skulle ha stryk!" Hela svenska folkets Moa — myten, manniskan och verket', in Eva Adolfsson et al., Vardagsslit och drommars sprdk. Svenska proletdrforfattarinnor frdn Maria Sandel till Mary Andersson. Hammarstrom & Aberg, Enskede 1981, pp. 108-63. Moa Martinson. Skrift och drift i trettiotalet. Norstedts, 1988.

Birgitta Trotzig Adolfsson, Eva, 'Birgitta Trotzig: "I karleken, den dodliga skadan'", in Eva Adolfsson, Igrdnsland. Essaer om kvinnligaforfattarskap. 1991, pp. 132-53. 'Dykungens dotter och den groteska kroppen', in Eva Adolfsson, I grdnsland. Essaer om kvinnligaforfattarskap. Bonniers, 1991, pp. 189—95. Bergil, Christina, Mb'rkrets motbilder. Tematik och narration i fern verk av Birgitta Trotzig. Brutus Ostlings bokfbrlag Symposion, Stockholm/ Stehag 1995. Bergsten, Gunilla, 'Dod och panyttfodelse. En aspekt av dysymboliken hos Birgitta Trotzig', in Par Hellstrom and Tore Wreto (eds), Ldskonst, skrivkonst, diktkonst. Aderton betraktelser over dikt och diktande jdmte en bibliografi over Thure Stenstroms skrifter. Askelin & Hagglund, 1987, pp. 201-14. Dahl, Christer, 'Levande eller dod', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 34, 1965, pp. 642-53.

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d'Heurle, Adma, 'The Image of Woman in the Fiction of Birgitta Trotzig', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 55, 1983, no. 4, pp. 371—82. 'Introducing Birgitta Trotzig', Swedish Book Review, 1983, no. 1, pp. 24-26. Hartman, Olov, 'Birgitta Trotzig och uppenbarelsen', Vdr losen, vol. 65, 1974, pp. 469-79. Noren, Kjerstin, 'Svarta bilder som betvingar morkret. Om Birgitta Trotzigs forfattarskap', in Kjerstin Noren (ed.), Linjer i nordisk prosa. Sverige 1965—1975. Bo Cavefors bokforlag, Lund 1977, pp. 399-425. Olsson, Ulf, / det lysande morkret. En Idsning av Birgitta Trotzigs De utsatta. Bonniers, 1988. Pleijel, Agneta, 'Manniskan, skapelsen, skapandet. Ett samtal med Birgitta Trotzig', Ord & Bild, vol. 91, 1982, no. 1, pp. 3-18. Sem-Sandberg, Steve, 'Sagoskimret over verklighetens lik. Anteckningar kring Birgitta Trotzigs roman, Dykungens dotted, Vdr losen, vol. 76, 1985, pp. 259-71. Trotzig, Birgitta, 'Det sekulariserade Sverige: Det sakralas hemligheter', in [Goran Therborn et al.], Lycksalighetens halvo. Den svenska vdlfdrdsmodellen och Europa. FRN-Framtidsstudier, 1987, pp. 77—107. Vincent, Mona, 'Birgitta Trotzigs Ordgrdnser - ett tolkningsfbrslag', Samlaren, vol. 92, 1971, pp. 40-73. 'Kosmogoni och apokalyps — tva intertextuella paragram i Birgitta Trotzigs Teologiska variationer', Samlaren, vol. 103, 1982, pp. 17—27. Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba, 'Modersabjekt och apokalyps. En lasning av Birgitta Trotzigs roman Sjukdomen', in Lars Nylander (ed.), Litteratur och psykoanalys — en antologi om modem psykoanalytisk litteraturtolkning. Norstedts, 1986, pp. 298-318.

Sara Lidman Adolfsson, Eva, 'I Sara Lidmans gransvarldar', in Eva Adolfsson, / grdnsland. Essder om kvinnliga forfattarskap. Bonniers 1991, pp. 205—41. Bergom-Larsson, Maria, 'Sara Lidman — leendet och svardet', in Maria Bergom-Larsson, Kvinnomedvetande. Om kvinnobild, familj och klass i litteraturen. Raben & Sjogren, 1976, pp. 123-44. Borland, Harold H., 'Sara Lidman's Progress: A Critical Survey of Six Novels', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 39, 1967, no. 2, pp. 97-114. Forsas-Scott, Helena, 'In Defense of People and Forests: Sara Lidman's Recent Novels', World Literature Today, vol. 58, 1984, no. 1, pp. 5-9. Holm, Birgitta, 'Det stoff som jernvagar gores av. Nagra drag i Sara

Bibliography

307

Lidmans prosa', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 51, 1982, no. 1, pp. 51-58. 'Fasten lagda over gungfly. Smartan, skulden och vamjelsen i Lidmans romansvit', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 63, 1994, no. 5, pp. 8-18. Jannes, Elly, 'Den egentliga varlden var byn. Sara Lidman berattar om sin vag fran drom till verklighet', Vi, 1959, no. 9, pp. 14-15, 30-31. Kallestal, Carina and Sorlin, Sverker, 'Vreden som "lifsens rot'" [Interview], Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 52, 1983, pp. 322—9. Kirsch, Frank-Michael, 'Interview mit Sara Lidman', Weimarer Beitrdge, vol. 28, 1982, no. 12, pp. 25-33. Roster om Sara Lidman. ABF Stockholm, 1991. Schunnesson, Torgny and Wickman, Lars, 'Varfbr skriver Sara Lidman inte romaner langre?', in Kjerstin Noren (ed.), Linjer i nordisk prosa. Sverige 1965-1975. Bo Cavefors forlag, Lund 1977, pp. 265-93.

Kerstin Ekman Bredal, Bj0rn, 'Mord og m0dre/Murder and Mothers' [Interview], Nordisk litteratur, 1994, pp. 5-8. Death, Sarah, '"They Can't Do This to Time": Women's and Men's Time in Kerstin Ekman's Anglahusef, in Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott (eds.), A Century of Swedish Narrative: Essays in Honour ofKarin Petherick. Norvik Press, Norwich 1994, pp. 267-80. Ekman, Kerstin, 'Att tolka en kalla', Artes, vol. 19, 1993, no. 1, pp. 35-47. 'En roligare romantradition an den strindbergskt, modernistiskt enpipiga', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 62, 1993, no. 1, pp. 22—8. 'Obsessed by Society', tr. Joan Tate, Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, pp. 79-88. Forsas-Scott, Helena, 'Stories in a Changing Landscape: Kerstin Ekman's Latest Novel', Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, pp. 74-8. Palm, Anders, 'Om konsten att fb'rvandla', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 62, 1993, no. 1, pp. 40-6. Roster om Kerstin Ekman. ABF Stockholm, 1993. Schottenius, Maria, 'Tvanget att bejaka. Om Kerstin Ekmans Hdxringarna, Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 52, 1983, no. 4, pp. 235—47. 'Mellan kattens ogon. Om En stad av ljus', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 53, 1984, pp. 202-8. 'Skogen, ordet och tystnaden. Om Kerstin Ekmans Rovarna i Skuleskogen', Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 57, 1988, no. 6, pp.

425-8.

308

Swedish Women's Writing

Den kvinnliga hemligheten. En studie i Kerstin Ekmans berdttarkonst. Bonniers, 1992. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement Kerstin Ekman, eds. Sarah Death and Helena Forsas-Scott. Williams, Anna, 'Nothing Disappears: The Continuity of Kerstin Ekman's Work', Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, pp. 2-6. Wright, Rochelle, 'Kerstin Ekman: Voice of the Vulnerable', World Literature Today, vol. 55, 1981, no. 2, pp. 204-9. 'Kerstin Ekman's Crime Fiction and the "Crime" of Fiction: The Devil's Horn', Swedish Book Review, 1984, no. 2, pp. 13-16. 'Theme, Imagery and Narrative Perspective in Kerstin Ekman's En stad av ljus', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 59, 1987, no. 1, pp. 1-27. 'Approaches to History in the Works of Kerstin Ekman', Scandinavian Studies, vol. 63, 1991, no. 3, pp. 293-304. 'Androgyny and Psychic Integration in The Robbers in Skule Forest', Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement, pp. 47—49.

Sonja Akesson Lagerlof, Karl Erik, 'Var ar tradgardens trakt?', in Karl Erik Lagerlof: Samtal med 60-talister. Bonniers, 1965, pp. 66—72. 'Banvaktens janta hade ingen sjaT, in Karl Erik Lagerlof, Stromkantringens ar och andra essder om den nya litteraturen. PAN/ Norstedts, 1975, pp. 51-63. Lilja, Eva, Den dubbla tungan. En studie i Sonja Akessons poesi. Daidalos, Gothenburg 1991. Lugn, Kristina, 'Manniskan fb'ds skyldig. Sonja Akesson', in Ingrid Holmquist and Ebba Witt-Brattstrom (eds), Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria, vol. II. Forfattarforlaget, 1983, pp. 330-44.

Agneta Pleijel Persson, Lena, 'Till slut ar det jag sjalv som talar' [Interview], Kulturtidskriften Liv, vol. 2, 1983, no. 4, pp. 2-8. Pleijel, Agneta, 'Berattelsen om en berattelse', Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, vol. 11, 1990, nos. 1-2, pp. 50-59. 'Agneta Pleijel', in Goran Skogsberg (ed.), En roman av . . . . En bok for alia, 1994, pp. 130-40. Pleijel, Agneta et al, 'Jaget som kaos och spelplats. IntervjusamtaT, Divan, 1990, no. 1, pp. 32-8. Thompson, Laurie, 'Introducing Agneta Pleijel', Swedish Book Review, 1990, no. 1, pp. 2-4.

Bibliography

309

Mare Kandre Beckman, Asa, 'Att satta ord pa livet — interyju med Mare Kandre', Attiotal, vol. 5, 1984, nos. 17/18, pp. 18-23. Nilson, Petra, 'Motstandets fantastik. Man far inte tanka for mycket medan man skriver' [Interview], Bonniers litterdra magasin, vol. 16, 1992, no. 1, pp. 28-31. Sem-Sandberg, Steve, 'Livsrurnmets arkitektur. Nedslag i attiotalets svenska prosa', in Madeleine Grive and Claes Wahlin (eds), Att skriva sin tid. Nedslag i 80- och 90-talet. Norstedts, 1993, pp. 214-43. Williams, Anna, 'Dar allting kan ses. Familjebilder hos Mare Kandre och Anna-Karin Granberg', Tidskrift for litteraturvetenskap, vol. 24, 1995, nos. 3—4, pp. 3—16. Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba, 'Fula flicker, masochism och motstand. Samtidens kvinnliga stammor', in Madeleine Grive and Claes Wahlin (eds), Att skriva sin tid. Nedslag i 80- och 90-talet. Norstedts, 1993, pp. 298-317.

3. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WOMEN'S WRITING Abbreviations used for anthologies: An Anthology of Modern Swedish Literature = Per Wastberg (ed.), An Anthology of Modern Swedish Literature. Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, New York 1979 Contemporary Swedish Poetry = John Matthis and Goran Printz-Pahlson (tr.), Contemporary Swedish Poetry. Anvil Press, London 1980. Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women = Marian Arkin and Barbara Shollar (eds), Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women 1875-1975. Longman, New York and London 1989. Modern Swedish Poetry = Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo (eds), Modern Swedish Poetry in Translation. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1979. Modem Swedish Prose = Karl Erik Lagerlof (ed.), Modern Swedish Prose in Translation. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1979. Scandinavian Women Writers = Ingrid Clareus (ed.), Scandinavian Women Writers. Anthology from the 1880s to the 1980s. Greenwood Press, New York, Westport, Connecticut and London 1989.

Akesson, Sonja, Poem. In An Anthology of Modern Swedish Literature; also in Contemporary Swedish Poetry.

310

Swedish Women's Writing

Selected poems. In Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women. Selected poems. In Modem Swedish Poetry in Translation. Selected prose and poems. Swedish Books, 1980, no. 1. Antti, Gerda, 'I'll Get By' (excerpt from. Jag reder mig nog, 1983), tr. Ann Henning. Swedish Book Review, 1983, no. 2. Benedictsson, Victoria, 'Excerpt from Money' (Pengar, 1885), tr. Verne Moberg. In Scandinavian Women Writers. — 'From Money', tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1992, nos. 1-2. —— 'Excerpt from The Big Book' (Stora Boken, vol. II, 1982), tr. Verne Moberg. In Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women. Boye, Karin, Kallocain (Kallocain, 1940), tr. Gustaf Lannestock. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1966. Complete Poems, tr. David McDuff. Bloodaxe, Newcastle-uponTyne 1994. Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1988, no. 1. Selected poems. Swedish Books, 1980, no. 2. Selected poems. In Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women. Bremer, Fredrika, The Colonel's Family (Famillen H***, 1830-31), tr. Sarah Death. Norvik Press, Norwich 1995. The President's Daughters; including Nina (Presidentens dottrar, 1834; Nina, 1835), tr. Mary Howitt. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London 1843. The Neighbours (Grannarne, 1837), tr. Mary Howitt. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London 1842. The Home (Hemmet, 1839), tr. Mary Howitt. Longman, London 1843. A Diary (En dagbok, 1843), tr. E. A. Friedlasnder. Clarke, London 1845. Brothers and Sisters (Syskonlif, 1848), tr. Mary Howitt. Colburn, London 1848. The Homes of the New World (Hemmen i den Nya Verlden, 1853-54), tr. Mary Howitt. Hall, Virtue, London 1853. Hertha (Hertha, 1856), tr. Mary Howitt. Hall, Virtue, London 1856. Two Years in Switzerland and Italy; Travels in the Holy Land; Greece and the Greeks (Lifvet i Gamla Verlden, 1860-62), tr. Mary Howitt. Hurst andBlackett, London 1861-63. 'Jerusalem' (excerpt from Lifvet i Gamla Verlden, 1860—62), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1994: Supplement.

Bibliography

311

Dahlquist-Ljungberg, Ann-Margret, Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Edelfeldt, Inger, 'Rub, Rub It Out' (excerpt from Kamalas bok, 1986), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1991, no. 2. Edgren, Anne-Charlotte, True Women (Sanna kvinnor, 1883), tr. H. L. Brakstad. French, London [1890?]. See also under Leffler. Edqvist, Dagmar, Catalan Incident (Angela Teresas gaster, 1953), tr. Ingrid Enway Gunvaldsen. Angus & Robertson, London 1958. Black Sister (Den svarta system, 1961), tr. Joan Tate. Michael Joseph, London 1963. Ekman, Kerstin, "The Devil's Horn (excerpt from Pukehornet, 1967), tr. Rochelle Wright. Swedish Book Review, 1984, no. 2. 'From Fairy Rings' (excerpt from Haxringarna, 1974), tr. Gunilla Anderman. In An Anthology of Modem Swedish Literature. 'Kerstin Ekman's Witches' Circles' (excerpts from Haxringarna, 1974), tr. Linda Schenck, Sheila La Farge. Swedish Books, 1980, no. 2. 'From Magic Circles' (excerpt from Haxringarna, 1974), tr. Linda Schenck. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 'From The Spring' (excerpt from Springkdllan, 1976), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 'Why I Said Yes to the Swedish Academy' ('Darfor tackade jag ja till Svenska Akademien', 1978), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 'From The City of Light' (excerpt from En stad av ljus, 1983), tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright. Swedish Book Review, 1987, no. 1; also in Scandinavian Women Writers. 'From The Robbers of Skule Forest' (excerpts from Rovarna i Skuleskogen, 1988), tr. Anna Paterson. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 'From The Knife-Thrower's Woman' (excerpts from Knivkastarens kvinna, 1990), tr. Rose-Marie Oster. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. Blackwater (Hdndelser vid vatten, 1993), tr. Joan Tate. Chatto & Windus, London 1995. 'Childhood' ('Barndom', 1995), tr. Rochelle Wright. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. 'Memories and Dreams' (Acceptance speech, Pilotpriset, 1995, prev. unpubl.), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1995: Supplement. Flygare-Carlen, Emilie, The Rose of Tistelon (Rosen pa Tistelon, 1842), tr. [Mary Howitt]. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London 1844. Fogelklou, Emilia, 'From "Journey and Meditation'" (excerpt from 'Resa

312

Swedish Women's Writing

och meditation', in Minnesbilder och drenden, 1963), tr. Malin Andrews. Swedish Book Review, 1994: Supplement. Frostenson, Katarina, Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Garpe, Margareta, 'From The Child' (excerpt from Barnet, 1979), tr. Eivor Martinus. Swedish Book Review, 1987: Supplement. Hermodsson, Elisabet, Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Lagerlof, Selma, Gosta Berling's Saga (Gb'sta Berlings saga, 1891), tr. Lillie Tudeer. Chapman & Hall, London 1898. The Story of Gosta Berling, tr. Robert Ely. New American Library, New York 1962. 'The Outlaws' ('De fagelfrie', in Osynliga lankar, 1894), tr. Peter Graves. Swedish Book Review, 1993, no. 1. The Miracles of Antichrist (Antikrists mirakler, 1897), tr. Pauline Bancroft Flach. Little, Brown, Boston 1899. The Queens of Kungahdlla (Drottningar i Kungahdlla, 1897), tr. C. Field. Werner, London [1917]. The Tale of a Manor and Other Sketches (En hengdrdssdgen, 1899), tr. C. Field. Werner Laurie, London [1922]. Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1901—2), tr. Jessie Brochner. Heinemann, London 1903. Hen Arne's Hoard (Hen Ames penningar, 1903), tr. A. G. Chater. Gyldendal, London 1923. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils; Further Adventures of Nils (Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, 1906—7), tr. Velma Swanston Howard. Doubleday, Page, New York 1907-11. 'The Town that Swims on the Water' (excerpt from Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, 1906—7), tr. Peter Hogg. Swedish Book Review, 1994: Supplement. Liliecrona's Home (Liljecronas hem, 1911), tr. Anna Barwell. Dent, London 1913. Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness (Kdrkarlen, 1912), tr. William Frederick Harvey. Odhams, London [1921]. The Emperor of Portugallia (Kejsarn av Portugallien, 1914), tr. Velma Swanston Howard. Doubleday, Page, Garden City, New York 1916. The Outcast (Bannlyst, 1918), tr. [W. Worster]. Gyldendal, London [1920]. The Lowenskold Ring (Lowenskoldska ringen, 1925), tr. Linda Schenck. Norvik Press, Norwich 1991. Charlotte Lowenskold (Charlotte Lowenskold, 1925), tr. Velma Swanston Howard. Doubleday, Page, Garden City, New York 1927. The Ring of the Lowenskolds. Including The General's Ring, Charlotte Lowenskold and Anna Svdrd (Lowenskoldska ringen, Charlotte Lowenskold, 1925; Anna Svdrd, 1928), tr. Velma Swanston Howard. Doubleday,

Bibliography

313

Doran, Garden City, New York 1931. Mdrbacka (Mdrbacka, 1922), tr. Velrna Swanston Howard. Laurie, London [1924]. Memories of My Childhood (Ett bams memoarer, 1930), tr. Velrna Swanston Howard. Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, New York 1934. The Diary of Selma Lagerlof (Dagbok for Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof, 1932), tr. Velma Swanston Howard. Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, New York 1936. Harvest (Host, 1933), tr. Florence and Naboth Hedin. Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, New York 1935. 'Sister Karin and Sister Sisla' ('Syster Karin och Syster Sisla', in Host, 1933), tr. Linda Schenck. In Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women. Leffler, Anne-Charlotte, 'Aunt Malvina' ('Moster Malvina', in Ur lifvet, 6 vols, 1882-93), tr. Melissa Lowe Shogren. In Scandinavian Women Writers. Lidman, Sara, 'From Cloudberry Land' (excerpt from Hjortronlandet, 1955), tr. Verne Moberg. In Modern Swedish Prose. The Rain Bird (Regnspiran, 1958), tr. Elspeth Harley Schubert. Hutchinson, London 1963. 'He Would Not Listen' ('Den ohorsamme', in Vanner och u-vdnner, 1969), tr. Gunilla Anderman. In An Anthology of Modem Swedish Literature. Naboth's Stone (Nabots sten, 1981), tr. Joan Tate. Norvik Press, Norwich 1989. 'Goliath' (excerpt from Den underbare mannen, 1983), tr. Joan Tate. Swedish Book Review, 1984, no. 2. 'Fosterland' (excerpt from Jdrnkronan, 1985), tr. Linda Schenck. Swedish Book Review, 1990, no. 1. Lugn, Kristina, Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Selected poems. Swedish Books, 1980, no. 2. Selected poems. Swedish Book Review, 1987, no. 2. Martinson, Moa, Women and Apple Trees (Kvinnor och dppeltrdd, 1933), tr. Margaret S. Lacy [1985]. Women's Press, London 1987. Pleijel, Agneta, 'From Kollontai (excerpts from Kollontaj, 1979), tr. Gunilla Anderman. Swedish Book Review, 1987: Supplement. Summer Nights (Sommarkvdllar pa jorden, 1983), tr. Mark James. In Gunilla Anderman (ed.): New Swedish Plays. Norvik Press, Norwich 1992. Eyes from a Dream (Ogon ur en drom, 1984), tr. Anne Born. Forest Books, London 1991.

314

Swedish Women's Writing

'From He who Observeth the Wind1 (Vindspejare, 1987), tr. Joan Tate. Swedish Book Review, 1990, no. 1. The Dog Star (Hundstjdrnan, 1989), tr. Joan Tate. Peter Owen, London 1991. 'From Fungi (Fungi, 1993), tr. Joan Tate. Swedish Book Review, 1994, no. 2. Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Selected poems. Swedish Book Review, 1990, no. 1. Runefelt, Eva, Poem. Swedish Book Review, Specimen issue, 1983. Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Selected poems. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 2. Sodergran, Edith: Complete Poems, tr. David McDuff. Bloodaxe, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1984. Strom, Eva, Poem. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. Tikkanen, Marta, Manrape (Man kan inte vdldtas, 1975), tr. Alison Weir. Virago, London 1978. Love Story of the Century (Arhundradets kdrlekssaga, 1978), tr. Stina Katchadourian. Carpa, Santa Barbara 1984. 'From Little Red Riding Hood' (excerpt from Rodluvan, 1986), tr. Stina Katchadourian. Swedish Book Review, 1989, no. 1. 'From The Great Catcher1 (excerpt from Storfdngaren, 1989), tr. Irene Scobbie. Swedish Book Review, 1994: Supplement. Trotzig, Birgitta, 'The Story of S0ved Fischer' (excerpt from De utsatta, 1957), tr. Roland Hindmarsh. In An Anthology of Modern Swedish Literature. 'Diary' (excerpt from Ett landskap, 1959), tr. Roland Hindmarsh. In Lars Backstrom and Goran Palm (eds.): Sweden Writes: Contemporary Swedish Poetry and Prose. Prisma/Swedish Institute, 1965. 'In the Time of the Emperor' (excerpt from I kejsarens tid, 1975), tr. Bill Mishler. Swedish Book Review, 1983, no. 1. 'Prose Poems from Anima (excerpts from Anima, 1982), tr. Bill Mishler. Swedish Book Review, 1983, no. 1. Wagner, Elin, 'The Responsibilities of Freedom' ('Den anstrangande friheten', 1925), tr. Sarah Death. Swedish Book Review, 1986, no. 1. 'The Cheesemaking' ('Yste med kopelope', in Gammalrodja, 1931), tr. Sarah Death. In Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women. 'Excerpts from Alarm Clock' (from Vdckarklocka, 1941), tr. Sarah Death. In Scandinavian Women Writers.

Index Abenius, Margit, 113, 115, 116, 117,124-5,274,275,276 abjection, 64-5, 163 abortion, 31, 81, 166, 179 actresses, 23, 245 Adalen, 91 Adlersparre, Sophie, 19-20, 41, 56, 264 Adolfsson, Eva, 145, 153, 154, 155, 276, 277, 278, 279 adoption, 178, 227 Africa, 4, 197, 198, 205-6, 215 Aftonbladet, 14, 48, 243 Afzelius, Nils, 262 Agerholt, Anna Caspari, 271 Agrarian Party, 92, 102 Agrell, Alfhild, 21, 30, 32, 33; Domd (Condemned), 21-2; Ensam (Alone), 22; Karin, 261; Rdddad (Saved), 21, 22 agriculture, 1, 11, 12, 27 Ahlgren, Ernst; see Benedictsson, Victoria Akesson, Sonja, 4, 5, 7, 188, 236-42, 254, 290; Dodens ungar (The Babes of Death), 239-40, 241; Hastens oga (The Horse's Eye), 239, 241; Husfrid (Domestic Peace), 237, 238-9, 241 -2; Jag bor i Sverige (I Live in Sweden), 237-8, 241; Ljuva sextital (Lovely Sixties), 239; Pris (Price), 241; Sagan om StV(TheTaleofSiv), 239; Ute skiner solen (It's Sunny Outside), 236-7

Alfven, Inger, 185; Arvedelen (The Inheritance), 185; s/y Glddjen (The Yacht Joy), 185; Stadpatrullen (The Cleaning Patrol), 185 Algulin, Ingemar, 5, 132, 262, 268, 271, 277, 278, 283, 287 Allison, Maggie, 270 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love, 150; Det gar an (Sara Videbeck), 14-15, 45 Alverfors, Ann-Charlotte, 186; Sparvoga (Sparrow Eye), 186 Ambjornsson, Ronny, 244, 262; Ordning hdrskar i Berlin (Order is Prevailing in Berlin), 244 America; see United States Anderman, Gunilla, 273 Andersen, Hans Christian, 165,166 Andersson, Dan, 31 anorexia, 191 Antti, Gerda, 186; Ett ogonblick i sdnder (Moment by Moment), 186; Inte vane an vanligt (No Worse than Usual), 186; Jag reder mig nog (I'll Manage), 186 arbetardiktning (writing by, about and for working-class audience), 31 Arbetarnas Bildnings-Forbund (The Workers' Educational Association), 103 archetypes, 42, 57-8, 149, 165, 167,256 Ardelius, Lars, 260, 287

316

Swedish Women's Writing

Arkin, Marian, 290 Aronson, Stina, 3, 98-100, 199; Feberboken (The Fever Book), 98-9; Hitom himlen (This Side of Heaven), 99-100; Medaljen over Jenny (The Medal in Honour of Jenny), 99, 100 Arsta, 35-6, 39 articles, 32, 72, 81, 109, 127-8, 132, 133, 134, 174-5, 184, 197, 205, 207, 208, 226; see also reports Asklund, Erik, 277 Association for Married Women's Property Rights; see Foreningen for gift kvinnas dganderdtt Association for Women's Political Suffrage; see Foreningen for kvinnans politiska rostrdtt Asturias, Miguel, 199 autobiographical fiction, 84, 98, 110,122,141-2,143,145, 186-7, 191 autobiography, 31, 134 Axelsson, Sun; Drommen om ett liv (The Dream of a Life), 191; Honungsvargar (Honey Wolves), 191; Nattens arstid (Night's Season), 191 Babel, Isaac, 199 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 76 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 55, 266 ballads, 194, 232 Baner, Christine, 272 Barbusse, Henri, 97 battered women, 159, 180 Baude, Annika, 273 Baudelaire, Charles, 150 Benedictsson, Victoria, 2, 23-6, 30, 32, 33, 217, 261; Dagboken (The Diary), 25-6; Fru Marianne (Mistress Marianne),

25; Pengar (Money), 25; Stora •boken (The Big Book), 25-6; 'Ur morkret' ('Out of the Darkness'), 24, 26 Benjamin, Andrew, 267 Bentham, Jeremy, 36 beredskapslitteratur (literature of preparedness), 106 Berendsohn, Walter, 52, 265 Berg, Annika, 291 Bergom-Larsson, Maria, 132, 142, 277, 278, 283 Bergson, Henri, 79-80, 82, 83, 270 Bergsten, Gunilla, 161, 280 Bergvall, Helga, lS7;Jungfru Skdr (Virgin Pure), 187 Berlin, 115 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Henri; Paul et Virginie, 158 Bible, 61, 77, 78, 153-4, 189, 199, 209, 246 biographies, 52, 72, 73, 80, 81, 106, 113 Birmingham, 48 Bjarsdal, Gunilla, 291 Bjork, Leif, 114 Bjorkenlid, Bertil, 269 Bjornberg, Signe, see Stark, Sigge Bj0rnson, Bj0rnstjerne, 20, 21, 61 Bohme, Jakob, 199 Bohuslan, 16 Boklin, Per Johan, 37, 38, 39, 42-3, 45, 46 Bolmder, Jean, 287 book pricing, 181 Borgstrom, Eva, 260, 264 bourgeois realists, 32, 73 Boye, Karin, 3, 7, 98, 113-30, 193, 256, 257, 274, 275, 276; Astarte, 111, 119-21,122, 128; De sju dodssynderna och andra efterldmnade skrifter (The

317

Index Seven Deadly Sins and Other Posthumous Works), 130; For lite (Too Little), 126-7; For trddets skull (For the Sake of the Tree), 124-6; Gomda land (Hidden Lands), 117-18; Hdrdarna (The Hearths), 11819; Kallocain, 6, 106, 127-30; Kris (Crisis), 122-4, 126; Merit vaknar (Merit Awakes), 121-2; Moln (Clouds), 115-17; Samlade dikter (Complete Poems), 6 Brandell, Gunnar, 71, 113, 131-2, 268, 274, 277 Brandes, Georg, 20, 26 Branting, Hjalmar, 27-8, 91, 94, 97 Brecht, Bertolt, 190, 244 Bredal, Bj0rn, 287 Bremer, Charlotte, 263 Bremer, Fredrika, 1, 2, 5-6, 7, 11, 12,15, 17, 19,32,33, 34-51, 64, 70, 73, 106, 256, 257, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265; Brev (Letters), 34; En dagbok (A Diary), 45-7; Famillen H*** (The Colonel's Family), 5-6, 35, 39-41, 42; Grannarne (The Neighbours), 43-4, 45, 50, 57; Hemmen i den Nya Verlden (The Homes of the New World), 48; Hemmet (The Home), 34, 43, 44-5; Hertha, 11, 33, 35, 49-51, 78, 101, 265; 'Invitation to a Peace Alliance', 48; Lifvet i Gamla Verlden (Two Years in Switzerland and Italy, Travels in the Holy Land, Greece and the Greeks], 49; Nina, 41, 42-3; 'Om Qvinnans stilla kallelse' ('On the Quiet Calling of Woman'), 36; 'Om romanen sasom var tids epos' ('On

the Novel as the Epic of our Time'), 38; Presidentens dottrar (The President's Daughters}, 41-2, 43; Syskonlif (Brothers and Sisters), 47; Teckningar utur Hvardagslifvet (Sketches from Everyday Life), 34; Trdlinnan (The Bondmaid), 45 Brooks, Peter, 138-9, 144, 146,278 Brostr0m, Torben, 259 Buddhism, 115 Bunyan, John; Pilgrim's Progress, 145 Burke, Carolyn, 266 Butler, Josephine, 19 Buttle, 237 Canada, 249 capitalism, 93, 120-1, 154, 187-8, 206, 207, 208, 220, 221 Carsten Monten, Karin, 35, 263,264 Central Federation for Social Work; see Centralforbundet for socialt arbete Centralforbundet for socialt arbete (The Central Federation for Social Work), 19 centres for women-focused research, 180 child sexual abuse, 251-2 childbirth, 135, 137, 156-7, 159-60, 163, 201, 204 childcare, 19, 178 children's literature, 1, 105-6 Childs, Marquis, 93, 171, 271 China, 182-3 Christian Democrats, 102, 173 Christian socialism, 47 Christianity, 17, 20, 30, 31, 37,

38,50,97,115,116,117, 123-4, 140, 152, 188, 193

318

Swedish Women's Writing

Clarte, 114 Clarte (journal), 114 collective novels, 201 committed literature, 3, 4, 164, 182-4, 205 communism, 93, 131 Communist Party, 172 composers, 39, 188 comprehensive schools, 103 cooperative movement, 94 Cornell, Jan, 259,271 Crete, 85 Crimean War, 48 d'Albedyhll, Eleonora Charlotta, 14 Dagens Nyheter, 72, 132, 183 Dagerman, Stig, 106; De domdas o (The Island of the Doomed), 106 Dagny (journal), 19-20 Dahl, Goran, 283 Dahl, Tora, 109-10; Inkvartering (Lodging), 109-10; autobiographical series, 110 Dahlerup, Drude, 282 Dahlerup, Pil, 260 Dahlquist-Ljungberg, AnnMargret, 109, 256; Att lam gamla hundar sitta (Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks), 109; Barnen i stenen (The Children in the Stone), 109; Isoga (Eye of Ice), 109; Strdlen (The Ray), 109 Dahlstrom, Edmund, 175, 273,281 Dalarna, 61 Dalen, Gustaf, 27 Danius, S.M., 284 Davidson, H.R. Ellis, 264 Death, Sarah, 222, 223, 264, 267, 269, 273, 274, 287, 288

Delblanc, Sven, 3-4, 52, 184, 187, 259, 262, 265, 268, 271, 273, 274, 284-5, 287 Den svenska litteraturen, 5, 52 Denmark, 27, 94, 102, 105, 153, 176, 177, 179, 236 Depression, the, 18, 91 Derrida, Jacques, 274 dialects, 17, 77, 202, 209 diaries, 2, 24-6, 68, 130, 155, 184 diary novels, 38, 45-7, 78 divorce, 32, 134 doctors, 13, 73 documentary literature, 3-4, 183-4, 187, 205, 207; see also report genre Domellof, Gunilla, 113-14, 119, 120-1, 122, 123, 274, 275 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 150 double standards, 16, 21, 22, 25 drama, 3, 4, 6,7, 20, 21-3, 24, 28, 32, 33, 45, 54, 55, 56, 60, 73, 81, 106, 107, 109, 110, 179-80, 190, 212, 236, 237, 243, 244-5, 261 Dunsby, Maren, 284 Durkheim, Emile, 83, 121, 128,275 dystopia, 127-30 eco-feminism, 71, 85-6, 106-9; see also environment Edelfeldt, Inger, 191-2; Den forunderliga kameleonten (The Remarkable Chameleon), 192; Den tdta elden (The Dense Fire), 192; Ifiskens mage (In the Belly of the Fish), 191; Kamalas bok (Kamala'sBook), 191-2; Rit (Ritual), 192 Edfelt, Johannes, 272 Edgren, Anne-Charlotte; see Leffler, Anne-Charlotte

Index Edgren-Leffler, Anne-Charlotte, see Leffler, Anne-Charlotte Edqvist, Dagmar, 109 Edstrom, Vivi, 57, 68, 261, 266, 267, 268 Eduards, Maud, 176, 180, 282, 283 education, 13, 29-30, 37, 41, 48, 49, 50, 54-5, 64, 72, 73, 92, 95, 103-4, 133-4, 171, 174, 237 Ekelof, Gunnar, 3, 98, 114-15, 127, 160, 276 Ekelof, Maja; Rapport frdn en skurhink (Report from a Scouring-Pail), 184 Ekelund, Vilhelm, 116 Ekenvall, Asta, 239 Eklund, Klas, 281 Ekrnan, Kerstin, 4, 5, 6, 56, 187-8, 216-35, 255, 256, 257, 266, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292; 30 meter mord (Thirty Metres of Murder), 218; Anglahuset (House of Angels), 220-5, 257; De tre smd mdstama (The Three Little Masters), 218; Dodsklockan (The Death Knell), 218; En stad av ljus (A City of Light), 187, 220-1, 225-8, 230, 257; Han rorpd sig (He Is Alive), 218; Hdndelser vid vatten (Blackwater), 6, 220, 232-5; Hdxringarna (Magic Circles), 187, 220-5, 234-5, 257; Hunden (The Dog), 228-9; Knivkastarens kvinna (The Knife-Thrower's Woman), 231-2, 252; Menedama (The Perjurers), 219; Marker och bldbdrsris (Darkness and Bilberry Sprigs), 219-20; Pukehornet (The Devil's Horn), 218-19; Rovarna i Skuleskogen (The

319

Robbers of Skule Forest), 229-31, 234-5; Springkdllan (The Spring), 220-5, 257 Elgstrom, Anna-Lenah, 270 Eliot, George, 48 Eliot, T.S., 76, 270; The Waste Land, 115, 127-8 Elkan, Sophie, 29 Ellestrom, Lars, 284 emancipation, 35, 37, 45-6, 109 Emerson, Caryl, 266 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 48 emigration, 18, 61 Engelstad, Irene, 259 Enquist, Per Olov, 184 Entwicklungsroman, 100, 107, 122 environment, 81, 102, 107-9, 173, 208, 211-15, 233, 234-5, 256, 257; see also eco-feminism epistolary novel, 38, 43-4, 110 Equal Opportunities Advisory Committee (Jamstalldhetsdelegationeri), 177-8 Equal Opportunities Act, 178 equal pay, 13, 92, 105, 176, 179 equality, 1-2, 25, 30, 31, 37, 71, 80, 172, 174-5, 176, 178, 179, 180,183 Ericsson, Lars Magnus, 27 Erlander, Tage, 101, 172 essays, 38, 86, 113, 115, 132-3, 188-9 Estonia, 249 European Economic Community, 102 European Free Trade Association, 102 Evander, Per Gunnar, 184 Fahlgren, Margaretha, 5, 20-1, 259, 261, 283-4 fairytales, 60, 61, 84-5, 137, 140-1, 144, 147, 151, 165, 167

320

Swedish Women's Writing

family novels, 17, 34, 39-43, 44-5 Fanon, Frantz, 198 father/child relationships, 111, 161, 174-5 father/daughter relationships, 24, 216, 226, 247 father/son relationships, 80, 162-4, 206 Federation for the Abolition of Regulated Prostitution, 19 fern unga (five young men), 98, 99 female desire, 15, 16-17, 22, 23, 24-5,40-1,96, 116 female sexuality, 23, 24, 26, 30,85, 100,117,153,204, 205, 245 feminine difference, 31, 71, 76, 78, 132-3, 203 feminine multiplicity, 3, 117, 118-9; see also multiplicity feminism, 2, 31, 36, 37, 38, 58, 70, 71, 74, 79, 82, 83, 94, 98, 109, 114, 131, 134, 185, 187, 188, 190-1,215,216, 229, 248, 256; first-wave, 2; second-wave, 2, 4, 6-7, 103, 110, 132, 171, 174, 179, 180, 188, 190, 236; see also women's movements feminist literary criticism, 5, 7, 14, 29, 35, 53, 54, 71-2, 101, 132, 257-8 feminist pacifism, 48, 64, 71, 72, 75-7, 81-3, 85-7, 106-9 130, 155; see also pacifism Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 242 film, 81,216-17,245 film scripts, 81, 110, 243, 244 fin-de siecle, 29 Finland, 2, 12, 35, 47, 95, 105, 176, 177 Finland-Swedish literature, 95 First World War, 28,

64, 75-6, 85, 91, 101, 104 Fja'Ustedt, Linnea, 186; Hungerpesten (The Plague of Hunger), 186 Fletcher, John, 267 Flygare-Carlen, Emilie, 15, 16-17, 33; Ett kopmanshus i skdrgarden (A Merchant Family in the Archipelago), 17; Rosen pa Tistelon (The Rose of Tistelon), 16-17 Fogelklou, Emilia, 31, 33, 79-80, 83, 269-70, 271; Arnold, 31; Barhuvad (Bare-Headed), 31; Bortom Birgitta (Prior to St Bridget), 31; Resfdrdig (Ready to Leave), 31 folk high schools, 31, 216-17 folkhem (home of the people), 92, 101,102, 149-50, 221; see also welfare state Folkteatern, Gothenburg; see People's Theatre Foreningen for gift kvinnas dganderdtt (The Association for Married Women's Property Rights), 13 Foreningen for kvinnans politiska rostrdtt (The Association for Women's Political Suffrage), 28 Forsas-Scott, Helena, 259, 267, 268, 270, 273, 274, 276, 282, 287, 288 Fourier, Charles, 47 France, 27, 31, 97-8, 101, 150 Fredrika Bremer-Forbundet (The Fredrika Bremer Association), 11, 19-20 Fredriksson, Marianne; Evas bok (The Book of Eve), 189; Kains bok (The Book of Cain), 189; Syndafloden (The Flood), 189 free churches, 18, 110

Index free love, 30 French Revolution, 14 Freud, Sigmund, 60, 68-9, 84, 85, 123, 138-9, 253 Fridegard, Jan, 141 Eroding, Gustaf, 2-3, 29, 116 Frostenson, Katarina, 4, 193-5, 284; Berdttelserfran dom (Tales from Them), 194; Den andra (The Other), 194; Idetgula (In the Yellow), I94;joner (Ions), 194; Rena land (Clean Lands), 194 Galsworthy, John, 217 Garpe, Margareta, 190; Josses flickor (Good God Girls), 190; Karleksforestallningen (The Notion of Love/The Play about Love), 190 Garton, Janet, 273 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 48 gender, 184, 191, 236 gender roles, 71, 171, 179, 180, 185, 241; debate, 2, 6-7, 102-3, 174-5, 177, 179; seminars, 180 Germany, 27, 31, 94, 110, 124, 127, 244 Gilbert, Sandra M., 5, 35 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 76, 269 glove-makers, 19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Faust, 44, 56, 58 Goransson, Sverker, 259 Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofartstidning, 94 Gothenburg, 16, 114, 149, 150, 179, 244, 249 Gothic novel, 16 Gothicism, 45 Gotland, 237 governesses, 21-2, 41

321

Grave, Elsa, 107-9, 256, 273; Ariel, 107; Bortforklaring (Excuse), 107; Evighetens barnbarn (The Grandchildren of Eternity), 109; Fldsksabbat (Bacon Sabbath), 107; Hdjdforlust (Loss of Altitude), 108; Isdityramb (Ice Dithyramb), 108; Modrar som vargar (Mothers as Wolves), 108; Slutforbannelser (Final Curses), 109; Tre lyriskagral (Three Lyrical Quarrels), 107 Graves, Robert, 80, 270 Great Britain, 5, 11, 12, 19, 31, 34, 72, 101, 105, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 255-6 Great Exhibition, London 1851, 12, 48 Greece, 49, 85 Green Party, 173 Grimm, the brothers, 84 Grive, Madeleine, 283 Gross, Elizabeth, 65, 267 Gmpp 8 (Group 8), 179, 183 Gubar, Susan, 5, 35 guilds, 13 Gullberg, Berit, 289 Gulli, Brita, 282 Gunnarson, Bjorn, 284 Gustafsson, Barbro, 276 Gustafsson, Lars, 4, 184 Haavio-Mannila, Elina, 282 Hadenius, Stig, 271, 272, 281 Hagerfors, Anna Maria, 288 Halldor Laxness, 199 Halsaa, Beatrice, 176, 282 Hammarberg, Jarl, 237 Hammarskjold, Dag, 102 Hansson, Cecilia, 284 Hansson, Per Albin, 92, 101 Harding, Gunnar, 290

322

Swedish Women's Writing

Harnosand, 217 Harrie, Ivar, 81, 270 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 82-3, 270 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 48 Hebbe, Wendela, 14 Hedenvind-Eriksson, Gustav, 31 Hegel, Friedrich, 37 Heidenstam, Verner von, 2-3,29,116 Hellstrom, Par, 270, 280 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 37 Hermodsson, Elisabet, 188-9, 256, 283; Dikt-ting (Poems Objects), 188; Disa Nilssons visor (Disa Nilsson's Songs), 188; Gor dig synlig (Make Yourself Visible), 189; Ord i kvinnotid (Words in Women's Time), 188-9; Skapelse utl'dmnad (Creation Abandoned), 189; Vadgorvi med sommaren, kamrater (What Are We Doing to the Summer, Comrades), 188 herstory, 86, 190 Hertha (journal), 11 Hesse, Herman, 150 Heurling, Bo, 285, 286 Hierta-Retzius, Anna, 263 higher education, 13, 103, 104 Hill, Joe, 219 Himmelstrand, Ulf, 260 Hiroshima, 109 Hitler, Adolf, 94, 127, 130 Hjerten, Kristina, 287 Holderlin, Friedrich, 116, 150 Hollo, Anselm, 290 Hohn, Birgitta, 35, 40, 41, 53, 54, 58, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 285 Holmberg, Per, 273 Holmquist, Ingrid, 290 Holquist, Michael, 266 Homer, 63

homosexuality, 117, 205; see also lesbianism Hornstrom, Marianne, 272 Howitt, Margaret, 39 Huntford, Roland, 171 Huntingdon, Samuel, 208 Huxley, Aldous; Brave New World, 127 Ibsen, Henrik, 20, 21; JB Dukkehjem (A Doll's House), 21 Iceland, 176 Icelandic sagas, 53, 61 Idun (journal), 72 illegitimate children, 12 immigration, 104-5 imperialism, 187-8, 208 incest, 247-8 Independent Foreign Fiction Award, 6 industrialisation, 12, 18-19, 27, 86, 91, 142 industry, 11, 12, 18-19, 27, 31, 104, 172 Institute of Drama, Stockholm, 243 International Stockholm Exhibition 1897, 27 intertextuality, 73-5, 77-8, 81-3, 232 Irigaray, Luce, 53-4, 117, 266 Isaksson, Ulla, 106, 110-12, 274; De tvd saliga (The Blessed Couple), 111; Dit du icke vill (Whither Thou Wouldest Not), 110-11; Elin Wagner, 106; Fodelsedagen (The Birthday), 111-2; Kldnningen '(The Dress), 111; Kvinnohuset (House of Women), 110; Paradistorg (Paradise Place), 111 Italy, 23, 49, 150

Index Jaderlund, Ann, 4, 193; marker md'rka morkt kristaller (darkness dark darkly crystal), 193; Rundkyrka och sjukhusldngor vid vattnet Himlen drforgylld av solens sista strdlar (Round Church and Hospital Blocks by the Water The Sky is Golden from the Last Rays of the Sun), 193 Jaensson, Knut, 268 jamlikhet (equality), 172 jdmstalldhet (equal status), 172, 180 Jdmstdlldhetsdelegationen (Equal Opportunities Advisory Committee), 177-8 Jamtland, 217 Jannes, Elly, 285 Jensen, Johannes V.; Brceen (The Glacier), 134 Jerusalem, 61 Johannesson, Hans-Erik, 259 Johanson, Klara, 61, 259, 262, 263, 265 Johnson, Eyvind, 106, 141 Jonung, Christina, 175-6, 281, 282 journalism, 70, 81 journalists, 14, 32, 70, 72, 73-5, 81, 82-3, 93 journals, 2, 11, 13,19-20,34, 72-3,81,94,114-15,125,133, 179, 268, 269 Juan de la Cruz, 150 Jung, Carl Gustaf, 227 Junghuhn, Franz Wilhelm, 248 Kafka, Franz, 150 Kalevala, 47 Kallestal, Carina, 285, 286 Kandre, Mare, 4, 192, 236, 248-54, 257, 291, 292; Aliide, Aliide, 248-9, 250-2, 253; Bebddelsen (The Annunciation),

323

250; Btibins unge (Biibin's Kid), 250; Deliria (Deliria), 252, 253; Djdvulen och Gud (The Devil and God), 252; left annat land (In a Different Country), 249-50; Quinnan och Dr Dreuf (Woman and Dr Dreuf), 252-3 Kastberg, Willy R., 285 Katrineholm, 216 Kellgren, Johan Henrik, 123 Kellgren, Ragna, 268-9 Kennedy, Marie, 291 Kenya, 198, 206 Kermode, Frank, 279 Key, Ellen, 29-31, 32, 33, 64, 71, 76,101,110,111,256,262; Barnets drhundrade (The Century of the Child), 30; Kdrleken och dktenskapet (Love and Marriage), 30 Keynes, John Maynard, 92 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 150 Kingsley, Charles, 48 Kirsch, Frank-Michael, 285 Kiruna, 183, 207, 208 Kjellen, Alf, 264-5 Kjellen, Birgitta: see Trotzig, Birgitta Klein, Viola, 174 Kleman, Ellen, 262, 263 Knorring, Sophie von, 15-16, 17, 33; Cousinerna (The Cousins), 15; Ulusionerna (The Illusions), 15-16 Kock, Karin, 177 Kollontay, Alexandra, 244 Kovalevsky, Sonja, 244-5 Kreuger, Ivar, 91-2 Kristeva, Julia, 53, 64-5, 163, 167, 268 Kristianstad, 150 Krusenstjerna, Agnes von, 100-1, 272; Fattigadel (Petty Nobility),

324

Swedish Women's Writing

101; Froknarna von Pahlen (The Misses von Pahlen), 100-1; Tony trilogy, 100 Kungalv, 60 Kungliga dramatiska teatern, Stockholm; see Royal Dramatic Theatre Kvinnliga medborgarskolan pa Fogelstad (Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad), 2, 73, 133-4, 137 Kvinnobulletinen (The Women's Bulletin), 179 Kvinnoligan (The Women's League), 179 Kyle, Gunhild, 260 Lacan, Jacques, 194,219 Lacy, Margaret S., 277 Lagercrantz, Olof, 275, 276 Lagerkvist, Par, 3, 106; I den tiden (At that Time), 127 Lagerlof, Karl Erik, 285 Lagerlof, Selma, 1, 2-3, 5-6, 29, 32, 33, 52-69, 70, 72, 80, 87, 95, 217, 255, 256, 257, 262, 265, 266, 267, 268, 292; Anna Svdrd, 66-8; Antikrists mimkler (The Miracles of Anti-Christ], 60; Bannlyst (The Outcast], 64-6; Charlotte Lowenskold, 66-8; Dagbokfor Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof (The Diary of Selma Lagerlof), 68-9; Drottningar i Kungahdlla (The Queens of Kungahdlla}, 60; En herrgdrdssdgen (The Tale of a Manor), 60, 69; 'En saga om en saga' ('A Story about a Story'), 55-6; Gosta Berlings saga (Gosta Berling's Saga), 6, 55-60, 62,68,69, 155; Hen Ames penningar (Herr Arm's Hoard],

60; Jerusalem, 61-3, 68, 148; Kejsaren av Portugallien (The Emperor ofPortugallid], 65, 161; Korkarlen (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness], 64; Lowenskoldscykeln (The Lowenskold Cycle], 66-9; Lowenskoldska ringen (The Lowenskold Ring], 5-6, 66, 67-8; Mdrbacka, 52; Nils Holgerssons underbara resagenom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Further Adventures of Nils], 64 Lagerroth, Erland, 266, 267 Lagerroth, Ulla-Britta, 266 Lamberth, Pia, 271 Landquist, John, 70, 79, 268 Landskrona, 55, 72 Landsorganisationen; see Swedish Trade Union Confederation Lang, Maria, pseudonym of DagmarLange, 195 Lange, Dagmar, see Lang, Maria Larsson, Lisbeth, 284 Larsson, Stig, 4 Lawrence, D.H., 150 League of Nations, 94 Leffler, Anne-Charlotte, 21, 22, 30, 32, 33, 245, 261; En sommarsaga (A Summer Tale), 23; Hur mangorgodt (Doing Good), 23; Kvinnlighet och erotik (Femininity and Eroticism), 23; Sanna kvinnor (True Women], 22-3, 261; Skddespelerskan (The Actress), 23 Leffler, Yvonne, 259-60 Left Party, 177 legislation; concerning abortion, 179; education, 13; employment, 93; equal opportunities, 178; families, 92-3; inheritance, 13; legal independence, 12, 13, 49,

Index 50, 265; local government, 18; marriage, 92; parental leave, 178-9; riksdag (Swedish Parliament), 18; suffrage, 91 Leijonhufvud, Sigrid, 41, 264 Leissner, Maria, 177 Lenngren, Anna-Maria, 14; 'Nagra ord till min k. dotter' ('A Few Words to My Dear Daughter'), 14 lesbianism, 100, 113; see also homosexuality letters, 29, 34, 37, 39, 53, 69, 97, 225 Levertin, Oscar, 52, 265 Liberal Party, 177 liberalism, 12, 14, 19, 29-30 Lidman, Sara, 3-4, 183, 187-8, 197-215, 256, 285, 286; Ban mistel (Carrying the Mistletoe), 204-5; Den underbare mannen (The Wonderful Man), 209-15; Din tjdnare hor (Thy Servant Heareth), 187; 209-15; Fdglama i Nam Dinh (The Birds of Nam Dinh), 207; Gruva (Iron Ore Mine), 183, 199,.207-8; Hjortronlandet (Cloudberry Country), 201-2, 203, 204, 209; Jag och min son (I and My Son), 2Q5-6;Jdrnkronan (The Iron Crown), 209-15; Marta, Marta, 212; Medfem diamanter (With Five Diamonds), 206-7; Nabots sten (Naboth's Stone), 6, 209-15; och trddet svarade (and the tree replied), 208; Regnspiran (The Rain Bird), 6, 202-4, 209; Samtal i Hanoi (Conversations in Hanoi), 183, 207; Tjdrdalen (The Tar Pit), 187, 199-201,202,203,209;

325

Vanner och u-vanner (Friends and Developing Friends), 207; Varje lov dr ett oga (Each Leaf Is an Eye), 205, 208; Vredens barn (The Children of Wrath), 209-15 Lidzell, Ake, 287 Liebknecht, Karl, 244 Lilja, Eva, 290 Lindblom, Gunnel, 245 Lindegren, Erik, 106; mannen utan vdg (the man without a way), 106 Linder, Erik Hjalmar, 71, 106, 113,131,268,272,274,276 Lindgren, Astrid, 1, 6, 106; Pippi Ldngstrump (Pippi Longstocking), 105, 106 Linnaeus, Carl, 37 Litteraturfrdmjandet (The Society for the Promotion of Literature), 182 Liverpool, 48 local government, 18 Locke, William, 217 Loewenstein, Andrea, 264 Lo-Johansson, Ivar, 3, 141 London, 11-12,48,72 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 48 Lonnroth, Lars, 259', 262, 265, 268, 271, 273, 274, 284-5, 287 Losman, Beata, 260, 2617262— Lowell, James Russell, 48 Lugn, Kristina, 189-90, 237, 240-1, 283, 290; Till min man, om han kunde Idsa (For my Husband, if He Were Able to Read), 189-90 Lund, 72, 179 Lundkvist, Artur, 150 Lutheran Church, 12, 152, 155 Lutheranism, 36, 77, 78

326

Swedish Women's Writing

Luthersson, Peter, 284 Luxemburg, Rosa, 244 Lyttkens, Alice, 107, 195 McDuff, David, 96, 272 machine-knitters, 33 magic realism, 184 male gaze, 24, 131, 136 Manchester, 48 Mann, Thomas, 217 Mannberg, Gustaf-Adolf, 291 Mannheimer, Carin; Rapport om kvinnor (Report on Women), 183 Marbacka, 52, 53, 54, 55 marriage, 13, 14-15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 30, 36, 39-40, 45, 57, 77, 85, 92-3, 134, 186, 200, 237,238-9 Martinson, Harry, 3, 114-15, 132, 134, 141, 217-18; Aniara, 111 Martinson, Moa, 3, 71, 84, 98, 131-48, 256, 277, 278; Brandliljor (Orange Lilies), 145-8; Den osynlige alskaren (The Invisible Lover), 148; Drottning Grdgyllen (Queen Greygolden), 139, 140-1, 146, 147; Hemligheten (The Secret), 148; Kungens rosor (The King's Roses), 84, 98, 141-5; Kvinnor och dppeltrdd (Women and Apple Trees), 6, 131, 135-9, 146, 147; Kyrkbrollop (Church Wedding), 84, 98, 141-5; Livetsfest (The Celebration of Life), 146; Mor gifter sig (Mother Gets Married), 84, 98, 141-5; Rdgvakt (Rye Watch), 139-40; Sallys soner (Sally's Sons), 135, 139; Vdgen under stjdrnorna (The -Road beneath the Stars), 145-8 Marx, Karl, 92, 199

Marxism, 114-15,164, 188 masochism, 191 maternity benefit, 93 maternity leave, 178 matriarchy, 31, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82-3, 84-5, 86, 189 Matthis, Irene, 284 Mattisson, Lena, 273 Mayakovsky, V.V., 244 Mayreder, Rosa, 76, 269 men as fathers, 175, 178-9 menstruation, 250 Merchant, Carolyn, 211, 286 Mesterton, Erik, 115 middle-class women, 11, 19, 25, 27, 48 midwives, 19 misogyny, 20, 74 Missentrask, 197, 199, 205 Moberg, Eva, 174, 281 Moberg, Vilhelm, 141 Moderate Party, 173 Modern Breakthrough, 2-3, 20-6, 28-32 modernism, 3, 29, 76, 94-100, 106,107-9,112, 113,114-15, 117, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 134, 140, 147, 152-3, 183 M011er Jensen, Elisabeth, 259, 260, 261, 268 Montgomery, L.M.; Anne of Green Gables, 105 mother goddesses, 44, 46-7, 50, 57, 76, 82, 163, 227 mother/child relationships, 30, 52-3, 64-5, 101, 108-9, 155-6, 157-8, 159-60,161, 162-4, 165-6, 174-5 mother/daughter relationships, 22,57,80, 100,111-12, 141-4, 203 mother/son relationships, 43-4, 50, 99, 141-2

Index multiplicity, 116-17, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130; see also feminine multiplicity Myrdal, Alva, 92, 174, 271 Myrdal, Gunnar, 92, 271 Myrdal, Jan, 3-4, 182-3, 207 myths, 3, 14, 32, 35, 38, 42, 44_5, 46-7, 48-51, 55, 56, 57, 58-9, 76-7, 78-9, 80, 81-3, 84, 119-20,140-1,144,147, 151, 152, 159, 162, 163-4, 166, 167, 184, 185, 187, 189, 192-3, 227, 232, 234, 246, 257 Nagasaki, 107 narrators, 186, 227-8, 246, 247; female, 38, 39-40, 41; first-person, 20, 78-9, 80, 84, 107, 123, 143, 218-19, 225, 231, 232, 247, 250; omniscient, 44, 107, 146; third-person, 81-2, 123, 143,218-19,225, 232, 251, 253 National Romanticism, 29 nature/culture split, 42-3, 58-9, 108-9,112, 154-5,158, 160-1, 165-6, 208, 210-12, 228-31,234-5 Nerval, Gerard de, 150 neutrality, 28 New Democracy, 173, 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 58-9, 96, 117,118,267 Mo kvinnor, nio liv (Nine Women, Nine Lives), 183 Nobel, Alfred, 27 Nobel Prize for Literature, 32, 55, 63 Nordenflycht, Hedvig Charlotta, 14; 'Fruentimrets forsvar' ('The Defence of Woman'), 14 Nordic Council Literature Prize, 197, 232

327

Nordic countries, 176 Nordin Hennel, Ingeborg, 261, 262 Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria (History of Writing by Women in Scandinavia), 5 Nordstrom, Ludvig, 32 Noren, Kjerstin, 164, 280-1 Noren, Lars, 4 Norrkoping, 133 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 102 North Vietnam, 4, 197, 198; see also Vietnam Norway, 12, 20, 27, 61, 94, 102, 172, 176, 177, 179, 217, 234 Nott, Kathleen, 171 Novak's, 150 nurses, 27, 36, 180-1 Nyb erg, Julia Christina, 14 Nylander, Lars, 280 Ohman, Ivar, 277 Olsson, Bernt, 262, 271, 278, 283,287 Olsson, Hagar, 97, 272 Olsson, Ulf, 153-54, 155, 278, 279, 280 Ornkloo, Ulf, 287, 288 Osten, Suzanne, 190; Josses flickor (Good God Girls), 190; Karleksforestallningen (The Notion of Love/The Play about Love), 190 Oster, Rose-Marie, 289 Ostergotland, 216 pacifism, 31, 48, 94, 131, 138, 184, 188, 256, 257; see also feminist pacifism Paget, Birgitta, 275, 276 Palestine, 34-5, 49 Palm, Anders, 113,289

328

Swedish Women's Writing

Palm, August, 19 Palm, Goran, 3-4, 107, 183, 273; Bokslutfrdn LM (Balance Sheet from LM), 183; EM ordttvis betmktelse (As Others See Us), 183; Ett drpd LM (One Year at LM), 183; The Flight from Work, 183; Indoktrineringen i Sverige (Indoctrination in Sweden), 183 Palme, Olof, 172, 173 parental leave, 178-9 parliamentarism, 1, 28, 91 peace campaigns, 28 Pearson, Karl, 84, 271 People's Theatre, Gothenburg, 244 Peterson, Marie, 284 Petherick, Karin, 283 phallogocentrism, 117, 124, 126, 257, 274 Plath, Sylvia, 250 Plato, 37 Pleijel, Agneta, 4, 7, 190, 236, 243-8, 254, 257, 260, 279, 291; Anglar, dvdrgar (Angels, Dwarfs), 243, 247; Berget pa mdnens baksida (The Mountain on the Far Side of the Moon), 244-5; Fungi (Fungi), 248; Hej du, himlen! (Hello, Heaven!), 244; Hundstjdrnan (The Dog Star), 6, 247-8; Kollontaj, 190, 244; Lycko-Lisa (Lucky Lisa), 245; Ogon ur en drom (Eyes from a Dream), 248; Ordning hdrskar i Berlin (Order is Prevailing in Berlin), 244; Sommarkvdllar pd jorden (Summer Nights), 6, 245; Vindspejare (He Who Observeth the Wind), 243, 245-7, 248 poetry, 2-3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 29, 31,

38, 40, 54, 55, 56, 95-8, 106-9, 113,114, 115-19,124-6, 133, 134, 150, 151, 182, 185, 188-90,192-5, 231-2, 236-42, 243, 248, 252 population, 11-12, 27 pornography, 171, 179, 190 Porter, Catherine, 266 postmodernism, 4, 100, 181, 182, 190-1, 236, 245, 247, 256 post-structuralism, 229, 234 Poulsen, Marit; Du mdnniska? (You, My Fellow Human Being?), 184; Marit har ordet (Marit is Speaking), 184 Pratt, Annis, 42, 264 pregnancy, 59, 93, 129-30, 136, 144, 156, 163, 204, 231 primitivism, 98, 133, 134 proletarian writers, 3, 131, 141 proletariat, 11, 148 prostitution, 19, 30 pseudonyms, 24, 195 Qvist, Gunnar, 265 Raivola, 95 Ramnefalk, Marie Louise, 266, 287, 292 rape, 80, 157, 159-60, 162, 180, 185, 229, 253 Register, Cheri, 30, 262 report genre, 182-4, 187, 197, 199, 207; see also documentary literature reports, 48; see also articles Rhineland, 72 Rhodesia, 183 riksdag (Swedish Parliament), 1, 18, 171-2, 177 Rimbaud, Arthur, 97-8 Risinge, 216 Robins, Elizabeth, 73, 261

Index Roman Catholicism, 151, 152 Romanticism, 14, 15, 16, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50, 57-8, 95-6, 116, 140, 193 Rostrdttfor kvinnor (Votes for Women), 28 Roudiez, Leon S., 267 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 14 Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 21, 244 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig, 56 Runefelt, Eva, 192; Aldriga och barnsliga trakter (Aged and Childish Regions), l92;Augusti (August); 192; En kommande tid av livet (A Future Time of Life), 192; Isvackan (In the Hollow), 192; Langs .ett oavslutat ogonblick (Along an Unfinished Moment), 192 Rushdie, Salman, 217; The Satanic Verses, 217 Russ, Joanna, 70-1, 268 Russia, 12, 95, 244 Russian Revolution, 244 Rydstrom, Gunnar, 260, 287 Rying, Matts, 285, 287 St Bridget, 2, 31 St Petersburg, 95 Saint Simon, Henri de, 46 Saltsjobaden agreement, 92 Samuelsson, Marielouise, 283, 287 Sandel, Maria, 31-2, 33; Vid svdltgriinsen (Close to Starving), 31; Virveln (The Vortex), 31-2 Sandqvist, Mona, 284 satire, 14 Scandinavia, 1, 2, 5, 16, 20, 28, 31,33,92,97-8,104-5,114, 171, 179, 195 Scheffauer, Herman, 269 Schelling, Friedrich von, 37

329

Schenck, Linda, 66, 268, 276, 288 Schoolfield, George C., 97-8, 272 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 79, 115,248 Schottenius, Maria, 227, 230, 289 Schwimmer, Rosika, 76 Schyberg, Gudrun, 177 Second World War, 1-2, 73, 83, 85, 86, 91, 94, 101, 102, 104, 106, 110, 172, 174 Segerstedt, Torgny, 94 sexual fulfilment, 30 sexuality, 20, 23 Shakespeare, 63 Shollar, Barbara, 290 short stories, 2, 3, 6, 22, 24, 29, 31,56,60,61,70,72,81, 100, 110, 115, 127, 134, 164, 186, 237 Showalter, Elaine, 255-6, 262, 292 Simpson, George, 275 single mothers, 22, 49-50, 133, 164, 220, 239 single women, 11, 12, 13, 27, 32, 36, 44, 49, 50, 69 Sinkkonen, Sirkka, 282 sisterhood, 31, 73, 74, 97, 110, 131, 137, 185 Siwertz, Sigfrid, 32 Sjoberg, Birger; Fridas bok (Frida's Book), 188 Sjoblad, Christina, 261 Skane, 150, 153 Skard, Torild, 282 Skjeie, Hege, 176 Skj0nsberg, Kari, 271 Skogsberg, Goran, 291 Smaland, 72, 73, 77, 78, 81, 186, 198 Snorri Sturluson, 60 Snyder, Paula, 281, 282 Social Democracy, 1, 71, 94, 101, 172, 221, 243

330

Swedish Women's Writing

Social Democratic Governments, 91-2, 101-2, 173, 177-8, 208 Social Democratic Party, 18, 19, 27-8, 31, 91-2, 133, 149, 172, 174 social motherliness, 76; see also women as mothers Social- Demokraten, 19 socialisation, 191, 194 socialism, 19, 60, 91, 101 socialist feminism, 179 Soderberg, Hjalmar; Den allvarsamma leken (The Serious Game), 186 Sodergran, Edith, 3, 95-8, 116, 160, 272; Dikter (Poems), 95-6; Landet som icke dr (The Land that is Not), 97-8; Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar), 97; Samlade dikter (Complete Poems), 6; Septemberlymn (September Lyre), 96-7 Sodermanland/Sormland, 133,187 Sodersten, Bo, 281 Sodertalje, 187 Sorlin, Sverker, 285, 286 South Africa, 182, 183,198, 206, 207 Soviet Union, 127 Spektmm, 114-15, 125 Spencer, Herbert, 30 Stael, Germaine de, 38 Stagnelius, Erik Johan, 193 Stahl, Gunnar, 274 Stalin, Josef, 127,244 Stark, Sigge, pseudonym of Signe Bjornberg, 195 stature ('cottar'), 142 Statens kulturrdd (The Council for Cultural Affairs), 182 Steenhoff, Frida, 270 Steiner, Rudolf, 97

Stendahl, Brita, 37, 263 sterilisation, 166 Stockholm, 11-12, 35, 47, 48, 54, 55, 63, 93, 114, 133, 173, 179, 181, 223, 237, 243, 249, 255 Stockholms allmdnna kvinnoklubb (The Stockholm Public Women's Club), 19 Stockholms fruntimmersforening for barnavdrd (The Stockholm Women's Association for Childcare), 19 Stockholms Posten, 14 Stodstrumporna (The Support Stockings), 181 starstrejken (The General Strike), 27, 31-2 Strandberg, Kerstin; Skriv, Kerstin, skriv! (Write, Kerstin, Write!), 183-4 strikes, 27, 31-2, 172-3, 208 Strindberg, August, 1, 2, 5, 20-1, 23-4, 32, 73, 261, 269; En dares forsvarstal (A Madman's Defence), 20; Ett dromspel (A Dream Play), 20, 60; Fadren (The Father), 20; Master Olof (Master Olof), 20; Taklagsol (The Topping Out Party), 74-5 Strom, Eva, 4, 192-3; Akra (Akra), 193; Brandenburg, 193; Den brinnande zeppelinaren (The Burning Zeppelin), 192-3; Det morka alfabetet (The Dark Alphabet), 193; Steinkind (Steinkind), 192-3 studentexamen (final school examinations), 13, 103, 114 suffrage, 29; female, 2, 3, 6, 18, 28, 29, 32, 72, 73-5, 91; universal, 1, 18, 27, 92 suffragists, 2, 63-4, 72, 75 suicide, 26, 115, 134,231

Index Sundstrom, Gun-Britt, 186; For Lydia (For Lydia), 186; Maken (The Spouse), 186 Svanberg, Birgitta, 101, 272, 275 Svanberg, Victor, 263, 275 Svensson, Goran, 260 Svensson, Per, 291 Swain, Joseph Ward, 275 Swartz, Kristina, 133 Swedish Academy, 32, 63, 70, 149, 193, 216, 217 Swedish Authors' Fund, 181-2 Swedish International Development Authority, 102 Swedish Parliament; see riksdag Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen), 19, 104 Swedish Writers' Union, 181 Switzerland, 49, 93, 95 syndicalism, 131 Tamm, Elisabeth, 85, 271 Tanner, Michael, 267 Tate, Joan, 284, 286, 288, 289, 291 teachers, 13, 27, 29-30, 31, 33, 37,

43, 45, 55, 72, 114, 180-1, 198,

202, 216-17 Tegner, Esaias, 56 temperance movement, 18, 19, 103 Therborn, Goran, 260, 261, 278 Theresa of Avila, 150 Third World, 102,182-3 Thorell, Gunnar, 286 thrillers, 187, 195, 216, 218-19, 233 Tidevarvet (The Epoch), 2, 72-3, 81, 94, 133, 268, 269 Tidskriftfor hemmet (The Home Journal), 13 Tigerstedt, E. N., 264

331

Tikkanen, Marta, 6, 185;

Arhundradets kdrlekssaga (Love Story of the Century), 6, 185; Man kan inte vdldtas (Manrape), 6, 185; nu imorron (now tomorrow), 185; Rodluvan (Little Red Fading Hood), 185 Time and Tide, 269 Times, The, 48

Toijer-Nilsson, Ying, 262, 266 Tomassori, Pdchard F., 261 Tornqvist, Gunnar, 273, 281 Torpe, Ulla, 53, 265 town/country split, 35-6 trade unions, 18-19, 27, 92, 93, 94, 104, 171-2, 178, 180-1 translations, 1, 5-6, 14, 16, 33, 39, 66, 70, 96, 127, 174, 175, 182, 195-6, 232 travel writing, 34-5, 48, 49 Trotzig, Birgitta, 3, 112, 149-67, 188, 193, 199, 217, 248, 250, 256, 257; De utsatta (The Exposed), 153-7, 159-60; Dykungens dotter (The Marsh King's Daughter), 164-6; En berattelse frdn kusten (A Tale from the Coast), 157-60; Ett landskap (A Landscape), 155; I kejsarens tid (In the Era of the Emperor), 164; Levande och doda (The Living and the Dead), 160-1; Ordgra'nser (Verbal Boundaries), 164; Sjukdomen (The Disease), 162-4; Sveket (The Deceit), 161-2, 164; Ur de alskandes liv (From the Lives of Loving Women), 153 Trotzig, Ulf, 150 tuberculosis, 64, 95, 198 Tunback-Hanson, Monica, 287, 290

332

Swedish Women's Writing

Tunstrom, Goran, I84;juloratoriet (The Christmas Oratorio), 184; Tjuven (The Thief), 184 Turkey, 49 Tykesson, Elisabeth, 286 Uhrbom, Odd, 183, 207, 285 Ulvenstam, Lars, 268 unemployment, 91-2, 173-4 United Nations, 102 United States, 18, 34-5, 38-9, 47, 48, 49, .105, 149, 207, 208, 219 universities, 103, 104, 180, 245; Extra-Mural departments, 103 University of Gothenburg, 103, 150, 243 University of Lund, 103, 107 University of Stockholm, 103, 114,244-5 University of Umea, 103 University of Uppsala, 54, 103, 114, 180, 198,216 Uppsala, 114,217 utilitarianism, 36 Utopia, 47, 93 Vallquist, Gunnel, 269-70 Valsjobyn, 217 Valtonen, Leena, 290 Varmland, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58,59,64 Vaudeville Theatre, London, 261 Vennberg, Karl, 164-5, 281 Vietnam, 198, 205, 207, 208, 209, 215; see also North Vietnam Vietnam War, 183, 198, 205, 207, 208 Vincent, Mona, 281 Vowles, RichardB., 290 Wagner, Elin, 3, 21, 31, 32, 33, 53, 63-4, 70-87, 94, 95, 101, 106, 109, 125, 130, 133, 189,

215, 217, 256, 257, 262, 265-6, 267, 268-71; Asa-Hanna, 77-8, 81, 148; Den namnlosa (The Anonymous Woman), 78-80, 82, 84; Diakgenfortsatter (The Dialogue is Continuing), 81-3, 84; Fred medjorden (Peace with Earth), 85-6; Genomskddad (Unmasked), 83-5, 98; Helga Wisbeck, 73; Hemlighetsfull (Secretive), 83-5, 98; Korpungen ochjag (The Young Raven and I), 268; Norrtullsligan (The Norrtull Gang), 73; Pennskaftet (Penwoman), 73-5, 78; Selma Lagerlof, 72, 73, 80, 81; Sldkten Jerneploogs framgdng (The Rise of the House of Jerneploog), 75-6; Spinnerskan (The Spinster), 269; Tusen dr i Smdland (A Thousand Years in Smaland), 81; Vdckarklocka (Alarm Clock), 71, 73, 81, 85-6, 109, 130, 179 Wahlin, Claes, 283 Wahlstrom, Lydia, 261 WallinJohanOlof, 36 Ward, Lester F., 76, 269 Wastberg, Per, 182; Forbjudet omrdde (Forbidden Area), 182; Pa svarta lisian (BlackListed), 182 Waugh, Patricia, 190-1, 257, 283 Weidel, Gunnel, 267 Weil, Simone, 150 welfare state, 1-2, 91, 173, 186, 189, 239; see alsofolkhem Wendelius, Lars, 265 Werin, Algot, 34-5, 263 Werkelid, Carl Otto, 280 Westberg, Anna, 266, 287, 292 Westman Berg, Karin, 180 Westminster Review, 34

Index White, Anne, 270 White, Barbara, 264 Whiteside, Shaun, 267 Whitford, Margaret, 274 Wibble, Anne, 177 Widerberg, Karin, 261, 271, 273 Widerstrom, Karolina, 13 widows, 12, 13, 33, 186, 219-20 Wieselgren, Greta, 263, 265 Wigforss, Ernst, 92 Williams, Anna, 224, 288 Wilson, Berit, 274 Winge, Mette, 259 Wingquist, Sven, 27 Wirmark, Margareta, 270 witches, 110-11,253 Witt-Brattstrom, Ebba, 131, 132-3,134-9, 141-2, 260, 272, 276, 277, 278, 280, 284, 290 women and employment, 13, 27, 30, 33, 73, 92, 99, 104-5, 171, 174-8,180, 184, 195, 221-3 women and men as mothers, 130 women as artists, 23, 24, 25, 39, 41-2, 47, 61, 127 women as mothers, 30, 31, 32-3, 36, 39, 45-6, 48, 77, 81, 82, 83, 92-3, 98, 101, 129, 131, 133, 135-7, 138, 139,143-4, 155-9, 174-5,176, 180, 185, 201, 204, 211, 214; see also social motherliness women as priests, 38, 78 Women Citizens' School at Fogelstad; see Kvinnliga medborgarskolan pa Fogelstad women in politics, 12, 28, 72,73-7,81-3,114,133-4, 175, 176-7 Women Teachers' College of Higher Education, 13, 54-5 women's centres, 179 Women's Culture Festival, 179

333

Women's International Congress, the Hague 1915, 72 Women's International Suffrage Alliance, 63 women's movements, 2, 4, 6, 11, 188, 190, 239; see also feminism Women's Studies, 180 Women's Tribunal, 181 Woolf, Virginia, 72; Orlando, 229; Three Guineas, 86-7 Workers' Educational Association; see Arbetarnas Bildnings-Forbund working-class women, 27, 31 working-class writers, 31-2, 71, 84, 94, 95, 98 World Exhibition, Paris 1937, 86 Wreto, Tore, 270, 280 Wright, Rochelle, 226, 227, 288 Wyer, Mary, 264 Yrlid, Rolf, 283 Zamiatin, Evgenii; We, 127 Zola, Emile, 20