Selma Lagerlöf

Swedish novelist

• Born: November 20, 1858
• Birthplace: Mårbacka, Sweden
• Died: March 16, 1940
• Place of death: Mårbacka, Sweden

Lagerlöf was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909) and the first woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy (1914). During her lifetime, she was loved throughout the world because of her gift for storytelling and her idealism, which was a welcome change from the pessimistic realism dominating the time. Since her death, she also has been increasingly recognized as a preserver of the folkways and traditions of rural Sweden.

Early Life

Selma Lagerlöf (LAHG-ehr-lawf) was born at M†rbacka estate in rural Värmland, Sweden, the fourth of five children. Her father, a navy officer, and her mother often read to the children old sagas, for example, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. From travelers, from workers, from an old housekeeper, from an aunt, and above all, from her grandmother, Lagerlöf heard folktales and legends told with such convincing detail that the children could not deny their truth.

When she was three, Lagerlöf was paralyzed, evidently by an attack of infantile paralysis. Although she later was able to walk again, she was disabled throughout her life. In an attempt to find a cure, she was sent for two winters to relatives in Stockholm. There she saw the world of power and fashion, so unlike M†rbacka; there, too, in her uncle’s library, she discovered the great Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott, whose fascination with the lives and the traditions of humble rural people may well have influenced Lagerlöf’s own attitudes toward the rich material of M†rbacka.

From the age of seven, Lagerlöf had intended to be a writer. When her father died, leaving only debts, which eventually necessitated the sale of her beloved M†rbacka, Lagerlöf’s road to higher education was blocked. It was a chance encounter with feminist Eva Fryxell that sent Lagerlöf on to school. After Fryxell heard one of Lagerlöf’s occasional poems read at a wedding, Fryxell advised the talented young girl to become enrolled in a teachers’ college. It was during her time there, when Lagerlöf was twenty-two, that she suddenly found her material: the stories of Värmland that she had heard in childhood and, in particular, the saga of the Värmland cavaliers. She worked on this story at first tentatively, then, settling into a poetic prose that was very different from the popular analytical, realistic style, she knew that she had found her voice. During her final years at college and her first years in the classroom, Lagerlöf continued work on the cavaliers’ story. In 1890, she submitted five closely related chapters in a novella contest and won first prize for her entry. As a result, a patron and friend arranged for her to have a year’s leave of absence from teaching. During that time, Lagerlöf completed Gösta Berlings Saga (1891; The Story of Gösta Berling , 1898; also as Gösta Berling’s Saga, 1918), the novel that brought her popular and critical success.

Life’s Work

The Story of Gösta Berling tells the tale of a group of appealing but rascally rogues led by a defrocked pastor, Gösta Berling. These rogues have descended on Ekeby Manor as permanent guests, to the dismay of the mistress of the manor, who believes in hard work, frugality, and responsibility. Like an epic, the work develops episodically; each of the twenty-three chapters relates a different adventure. The work is unified, however, by the central conflict between the free spirits, directed by the devil, and the strong woman, who must order her world.

Even though the public liked the work, critics carped about the fanciful material and the poetic style, which suggested a return to Romanticism, which had become thoroughly unpopular. Not until two years after the publication of the novel, when the influential Danish critic Georg Brandes wrote a review praising it, was Lagerlöf’s reputation really established in her native country. The next year, a collection of short stories sold well, and, in 1895, The Story of Gösta Berling went into a second edition. Now Lagerlöf could quit her teaching job and devote herself to her chosen profession.

With a stipend from King Oscar II, Lagerlöf was able to travel, and, as she went through Europe, to Italy, and later to Jerusalem, she was always alert to ideas for future works. In Italy, she heard a story about peasants’ veneration of a counterfeit figure, and the result was her second novel, Antikrists mirakler (1897; The Miracles of Antichrist , 1899). In 1897, she moved to Dalecarlia, an area near Värmland; there she was told of a group of peasants who the preceding year had become convinced that the end of the world was at hand, had sold all of their belongings, and had moved to Jerusalem, where many of them had died. Curious about the episode, Lagerlöf traveled to Jerusalem with her best friend, Sophie Elkan, and interviewed the survivors. The result was a two-volume work, Jerusalem I:I Dalarne (1901; Jerusalem , 1915) and Jerusalem II:I det heliga landet (1902; The Holy City: Jerusalem II , 1918).

While she was writing these complex works, Lagerlöf was also bringing forth simpler short novels as well as collections of short stories, perhaps the most popular of which was Kristuslegender (1904; Christ Legends , 1908), a collection of stories about Christ, which brought Lagerlöf to the attention of Americans. In 1906, she ventured into children’s literature at the request of the Swedish National Teachers’ Society, which hoped with her help to interest children in Swedish geography and history. Interestingly, it was the work produced as a result of this request, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (2 volumes, 1906-1907; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils , 1907, and The Further Adventures of Nils , 1911), for which she was to be most famous. The story is of a boy who for his misdeeds is turned into an animal and who then travels the length of Sweden on the back of a wild goose, noting the scenery and reforming his character as he flies; the story was eventually translated into forty languages.

Honors began coming to Lagerlöf with regularity. She received a gold medal from the Swedish Academy in 1904, an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1907, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, the first woman to receive the world’s highest honor in that field. In 1914, she became the first woman member of the Swedish Academy. Probably more important to her than all these honors was the fact that with the profits from her writings she was able to buy back her childhood home, M†rbacka, in 1907, and with her Nobel Prize money she purchased the entire estate. There she was to spend the rest of her life, functioning as an active landowner.

Evidently Lagerlöf’s return to her ancestral home stimulated her creative powers. Now when she heard the old tales, she had a double vantage point, the childhood memories and the adult perspective. Year after year, the works poured forth short stories, novellas, and novels. Among the latter was a book based on her grandmother’s life, Liljecronas hem (1911; Liliecrona’s Home , 1914), and the poignant Kejsaren av Portugallien (1914; The Emperor of Portugallia , 1916), the story of a father rejected by the daughter whom he loves above all else in the world.

Lagerlöf was also stimulated by her friendships with some of the most interesting men and women of her time. Among her closest friends were Valborg Olander, a teacher of Swedish, and the friend of her later years, the Baroness Henriette Coyet. In a sense, these relationships took the place of marriage; at a time when single women were circumscribed, they provided Lagerlöf with the emotional warmth and the companionship that she would otherwise have lacked.

During the 1920’s, Lagerlöf wrote a trilogy tracing one family’s history from 1700 to 1830, Löwensköldska ringen (1925-1928; The Ring of the Löwenskölds: A Trilogy, 1928), and began her three-volume autobiography with M†rbacka (1922; English translation, 1924) and Ett barns memoarner (1930; Memories of My Childhood , 1934). In 1932, she published the third book, Dagbok, M†rbacka III (The Diary of Selma Lagerlöf , 1936), an invaluable story of her early years, told in the form of a journal. The following year saw the publication of the writer’s complete works.

In her final decade, Lagerlöf was deeply concerned about the loss of freedom and the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Her opposition to the regime cost her many of her German readers. Unfortunately, Lagerlöf did not live to see the triumph of the forces of freedom. She died on March 16, 1940, at M†rbacka, the scene of her happiest memories and the major source of her material and her inspiration.

Significance

In an age that had spurned Romanticism, with its interest in humble people and in the supernatural and with its tendency to idealism, in favor of a realism that often stressed the worst traits in humanity and even suggested that there was no hope for improvement either in human beings or in their lot, Lagerlöf developed a unique kind of prose. Although she created realistic characters and placed them in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar, she included in her stories episodes and creatures whose reality depended on the tales passed down in Värmland and Dalecarlia from generation to generation. There was no academic superiority in her attitude toward these tales; instead, there was a willing suspension of disbelief, or perhaps a real belief, which carried Lagerlöf’s readers along with her.

If they loved her for her magic, Lagerlof’s readers also loved her for her idealism. She was not judgmental. One reason for the success of her works is that she never underrated the appeal of vice or folly. From her cavaliers to disobedient Nils to the wrongdoers in her so-called Ring trilogy, all of her imperfect characters are understandable, and, similarly, many of her most moral characters, like the leaders of the Dalecarlian exodus, are either mistaken or rigid. As she explores the human heart, Lagerlöf makes it clear that finally one must choose the right course and choose wisely, even at the cost of seeming dull.

It is this insistence that the world is divinely ordered that explains Lagerlöf’s power to fuse the ordinary and the magical. In remote Värmland, humble people fight demons no different from those in Stockholm; the difference is that the Värmlanders are strengthened by the wisdom of their traditions, by stories that, if not factual, have the validity of myths. The lasting popularity of Lagerlöf in Sweden and throughout the world can be attributed not only to her power as a storyteller and her powerful, lyrical prose but also to the fact that she assured her readers that the world was and had always been patterned in ways revealed by the myths of its people and that those myths must be remembered and understood, lest human beings and humanity itself move forward to destruction.

Bibliography

Berendsohn, Walter A. Selma Lagerlöf: Her Life and Work. Translated by George F. Timpson. London: I. Nicholson and Watson, 1931. A major study of Lagerlöf, emphasizing her poetic achievement and pointing out her departure from the realism and naturalism of her period.

Danielson, Larry W. “The Uses of Demonic Folk Tradition in Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berlings Saga.” Western Folklore 34 (July 3, 1975): 187-199. An analysis of the character of the devil, Sintram, who dominates the cavaliers in Lagerlöf’s first work, showing how he developed from folk materials into fiction.

Edström, Vivi. Selma Lagerlöf. Translated by Barbara Lide. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Part of Twayne’s World Authors series, this concise and accurate book is invaluable. After providing a detailed chronology and a brief biography, the author proceeds to clear, thoughtful chapters on the major works of Lagerlöf. The final chapter, “Selma Lagerlöf and the Role of Writer,” is one of the best summaries available. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Gustafson, Alrik. Six Scandinavian Novelists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1940. Helpful both for the fifty-page analysis that focuses on The Story ofGösta Berling and for the general introduction to the book, where Gustafson establishes Lagerlöf’s position among the writers of her native region.

Johannesson, Eric O. “Isak Dinesen and Selma Lagerlöf.” Scandinavian Studies 32 (February, 1960): 18-26. A fascinating comparison of Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937) and Lagerlöf’s M†rbacka. In addition to contrasting their approaches to autobiography, this article includes comments on the philosophical differences between the two women, which the author sees as explaining the difference in the extent of their influence on later writers.

Lagerlöf, Selma. The Diary of Selma Lagerlöf. Translated by Velma Swanston Howard. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936. Although it was written when Lagerlöf was in her seventies, this illustrated third volume of the autobiography recaptures the outlook of the naïve teenage girl who loved M†rbacka but found her first love and her vocation as a writer when she journeyed to Stockholm. Essential for any study of Lagerlöf.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Selma Lagerlöf. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936. A study of Lagerlöf as a superbly imaginative writer. A full analysis of each work, with special attention to the various collections of short stories.

Monroe, N. Elizabeth. “Provincial Art in Selma Lagerlöf.” In The Novel and Society: A Critical Study of the Modern Novel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941. One of the best studies of Lagerlöf in comparison to other modern writers. Directed specifically toward defining her uniqueness, both in form and in matter. Highly recommended for all readers.

Watson, Jennifer. Swedish Novelist Selma Lagerlöf, 1858-1940, and Germany at the Turn of the Century. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Surveys Lagerlöf’s impact on German authors, including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Nelly Sachs.