Nini Roll Anker
Nini Roll Anker was a notable Norwegian writer born Nicoline Magdalene Roll in 1860 in Molde, Norway, into an upper-class family. Her father was a respected magistrate and later became a supreme court judge, which afforded her a privileged education uncommon for women of her time. Anker's literary career began in 1898 with her first novel published under a pseudonym, addressing feminist themes and the exploitation of women. She became politically active, advocating for young women workers and addressing social issues through her writing. Anker's most significant works include "Benedicte Stendal" and "Det svake kjon," both exploring class tensions and women's rights. Over her career, she produced eighteen novels, five plays, and numerous short stories, tackling topics like labor exploitation, war, and women's domestic roles. Despite facing criticism and limited recognition during her lifetime, she is now celebrated as a key figure in Norwegian literature and feminism, contributing to the discourse surrounding women's issues and societal change. Anker passed away in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Norway, leaving behind a legacy of social and feminist advocacy through her writing.
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Subject Terms
Nini Roll Anker
Fiction Writer and Playwright
- Born: 1873
- Birthplace: Molde, Norway
- Died: 1942
- Place of death: Norway
Biography
Nicoline Magdalene Roll was born in Molde, on the west coast of Norway, into an upper-class family, where the father was chief magistrate and held various political offices. Eventually he became a supreme court judge and minister of justice. The family moved to Christiana (later renamed Oslo), where Nini received a rather better education than many girls of her time. Women in Norway during the nineteenth century were accorded few rights, a significant feature in her later writing.
In 1892, she married Peter Anker, part of Norway’s landed gentry class, and settled on his family estate. It was here she published her first novel in 1898 under a pseudonym. I Blinde rejects a free-love ethic on the thesis that women are as much exploited by it as under the conservative belief of women’s “purity.” It was a first venture into feminist questions. At the same time, she became involved in helping young women factory workers nearby, and in doing so became politically radicalized. Her second book, Lil-Anna og andre (little Anna, and others), is a series of stories about workers employed by the Anker family. Her husband saw this is a betrayal, and in 1907 they were divorced. She was remarried in 1910 to her husband’s cousin, Johan.
The novel that first brought her into some limelight was her next, Benedicte Stendal (1909), the diary of an unmarried girl caught in class tensions between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Several other novels on the position of women followed, culminating in 1915 in Det svake kjon (the weaker sex), a book many critics have thought her best. The heroine is a dutiful wife who finally realises her puritanical husband has merely used her for his own needs. From then on, a stream of novels emerged: some on the women’s question and domestic issues; some on war, about which she also wrote the drama Kirken, which premiered in Oslo in 1921. Only the women speak out against the horrors of war.
In her 1935 novel Den som henger i en tråd (hanging by a thread), she returned to labor issues, depicting the exploitation of seamstresses in a small-town garment factory. Issues of pay, sexual exploitation, abortion, false religion, and charity are all explored. Her biographers agree that the novel is one of the most important Norwegian social novels written between the two word wars.
Under the German occupation of Norway, she wrote a biography of her literary friend Sigrid Undset and a novel, Kvinnen og den svarte fuglen (women with black feathers), only published after the war. In all she wrote eighteen novels and five plays, plus several volumes of short stories. Perhaps because her feminism did not fit neatly in with mainstream feminism, she was not greatly acknowledged as a serious women’s writer in her own day, though she is now recognised as one of a whole lineage of Norwegian women writers who have done much to change the climate of opinion in their favor. Her wide-ranging sympathies on class and domestic conflicts need to be noted. She was also very active in the Norwegian Author’s Union, becoming its vice- president in 1916, and representing Norway at various committees of writers seeking world peace. She died under the Nazi occupation in 1942, two years after her husband.