Selma Lagerlöf: everything you need to know about the Swedish author
The name Nils Holgersson probably means something to everyone. But Selma Lagerlöf also wrote groundbreaking history beyond that: for example, as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Today, she is considered one of Sweden’s best-known writers.
Selma Lagerlöf’s life was rather unconventional, and she processed many of her experiences in her novels. Her books are particularly characterised by a strong sense of home and often interweave myths and popular beliefs with real stories. What characterises her novels above all is the episodic structure of the chapters and a naive tone reminiscent of fairy tales.
Selma Lagerlöf was a Swedish author. She is best known for her children’s book Nils Holgersson, but also wrote many other important works. She was also the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
| Born | 20 November 1858 on Gut Mårbacka in Värmland |
|---|---|
| Died | 16 March 1940 ibid |
| Most important works | The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, The Saga of Gösta Berling, Jerusalem, The Emperor of Portugallia |
| Achievements | Nobel Prize for Literature, honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Uppsala, member of the Swedish Academy, honorary doctorate from the University of Greifswald |
Life and work
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858 on the Mårbacka estate in Sweden. Her parents were well-off landowners and had her and her sister educated at home by a governess. However, several of Selma’s siblings died at a young age, including from tuberculosis. The author would later deal with her encounter with the disease in her books(The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Phantom Carriage).
As a child, Selma had a hip ailment that left her completely paralysed at the age of 3. Although her health improved afterwards, she was left with a lifelong limp. Due to these limitations, she saw herself as an outsider and later processed this feeling in her works. She also spent a lot of time reading as she could not play around with the other children and discovered her love of literature and the legends and stories of her homeland. She enjoyed performing puppet theatre plays she had written herself, but did not show much interest in housework and other activities considered appropriate for girls.
From the 1860s onwards, the economic situation deteriorated. Selma experienced the fear of losing her home, which she would later address in many of her books. Years later, Mårbacka actually had to be sold.
The start of her career
The life of a housewife did not appeal to Selma. After her school education, in the days without steady employment, she described feeling “a great and oppressive emptiness”. Against her father’s wishes, she went to Stockholm in 1881 and began training as a primary school teacher. Her father died a few years later. Her relationship with him seems to have left a deep impression on her: problematic father-daughter relationships, characterised by both deep love and serious conflicts, are also a recurring theme in Selma Lagerlöf’s works.
They worked as primary school teachers in Landskrona and published their first book at the age of 33: Gösta Berling. The novel initially received poor reviews and generated little income, so that Selma, contrary to her expectations, did not earn enough money to give up her teaching profession. Some critics were particularly offended by the main character’s depiction of an unbridled lifestyle. It was only after a very favourable review by the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes that the work experienced a revival and is now considered one of the most widely read Swedish books.
The Saga of Gösta Berling
Selma Lagerlöf’s first novel, 1891
The book, originally titled Gösta Berlings saga , consists of a series of loosely connected episodes.
It is about the priest Gösta Berling, who becomes the leader of a group of former officers and impoverished noblemen on the Ekeby estate. They spend their lives in various amusements, with Gösta’s drunkenness leading to his downfall.
The story is based on stories about people from Selma Lagerlöf’s homeland that she heard as a child. The episodes and characters are skilfully woven together and interwoven with Värmland fairy tales and myths.
“Now that I’ve been there and surprised the world, that I’ve been written about in all the Swedish newspapers and that I’ve been recognised as both a genius and a madwoman, I think I can breathe freely. I’ve certainly never been less arrogant than I am now, but it’s a great relief that people finally know who and what I am.”
Selma Lagerlöf, on the success of Gösta Berling
Worldly author
In 1895, Selma gave up her job as a teacher and then travelled extensively through southern Europe with her friend Sophie Elkan. Her experiences inspired her to write her novel The Miracles of Antichrist.
After this trip, she moved in with her younger sister in Falun in Dalarna in the heart of Sweden, partly because the region was regarded as the centre of Swedish customs and folk culture . There she learnt about a group of farmers from the village of Nås who had experienced a religious revival and then emigrated to Jerusalem to join an American sect. This story fascinated Selma Lagerlöf so much that she made it the subject of her novel Jerusalem .
The book was a great success and secured her final breakthrough as a writer. The second part of the work received less enthusiastic reviews and did not satisfy the author herself, so she revised it a few years later. The version in circulation today is the revised version.
Jerusalem
A new beginning and loss of home, 1901
Jerusalem is a two-volume novel that was heavily inspired by true events. Even the introductory chapter, which had previously been a stand-alone novella, is based on a real story that Selma Lagerlöf had read about in a newspaper: a man had picked up his fiancée from prison, even though she had previously killed their child.
The book interweaves two storylines: the fate of religious farmers emigrating to Jerusalem and that of the “Ingmar sons“, a respected farming family whose daughter becomes the leader of the emigrants and has the Ingmar farm at home auctioned off in order to have money for a new start. As a result, her younger brother loses his home and has to fight to get it back.
The themes of a strong, self-determined woman and the loss of a secure home can be found in many of Lagerlöf’s works.
Her most famous book
Her next project was to become her most famous work to date: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. The novel was commissioned by the Swedish Association of Primary School Teachers and was to be used as a textbook . Lagerlöf was enthusiastic about the task and wrote to her friend Sophie Elkan in a letter that the commission was a goldmine, even better than a Nobel Prize. She even travelled to northern Sweden to get to know the landscape there better and incorporated her enthusiasm into the book’s loving descriptions of nature.
Nils Holgersson
Schoolbook and love letter to Sweden, 1906
The novel with the original title Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (“Nils Holgersson’s wonderful journey through Sweden”) tells the story of the 14-year-old boy Nils Holgersson, who is turned into an imp because of his nastiness, especially towards animals, and travels all over Sweden with a group of wild geese .
The story contains many moral conflicts that give Nils the chance to grow as a character; it thus has aspects of an educational and developmental novel. It also offers a loving portrait of the Swedish regions and landscapes in order to convey local history . The places are often associated with regional legends and fairy tales. Gnomes (“tomte“) are also firmly rooted in Swedish folklore.
The story of the tame domestic goose Martin, like so many aspects of Lagerlöf’s work, is also based on a true story she was told about her home farm Mårbacka: a domestic goose had joined wild geese for a summer and returned in autumn with a partner and their children.
The book has been translated into over 30 languages and made into several films and series. It was also the first literary work to use the new Swedish spelling system. The novel was a huge success and was read by many generations of pupils.
The first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
In 1907, Selma Lagerlöf was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy at Uppsala University. Just two years later, she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the award ceremony, the Academy praised her achievement:
“In the rhythm of her poetry we find at every turn the echo of what has moved the soul of Sweden from time immemorial, and this makes Selma Lagerlöf especially dear to us. (…) It is in Alfred Nobel’s spirit to honour this woman who, with unprecedented success, made the most sensitive aspects of the human heart resound.”
Claes Annerstedt, at the presentation of the prize
A few years later, she became the first woman ever to be granted membership of the Swedish Academy, the institution tasked with promoting the Swedish language and literature and which has been responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1900.
Return to the homeland
in 1908, Selma bought the manor house in Mårbacka, where she had grown up, and later also the land belonging to it and other areas. She used the land to farm and produce oatmeal . From 1921 to 1923, she had the manor house rebuilt from a small red wooden house to an elegant manor house.
She wrote other important novels that once again tell stories of her homeland and the people there, such as Lijecrona’s Homeland (1911) and The Emperor of Portugallia (1914). She wrote her last major novel project, the trilogy The Lowenskold Ring, between 1925 and 1928. In later years, she recorded stories from her personal childhood in a three-part autobiography to give an insight into her life and the experiences that shaped her literary work.
Unconventional love and family
Selma Lagerlöf maintained a close connection to the writer Sophie Elkan throughout her life. She had made contact with her after reading one of her short stories, which dealt with Sophie’s own tragic fate.
In Falun, she later met Valborg Olander, a student counsellor, who also helped her with bureaucratic tasks.
Letters published in 1990 and 2006 reveal that Selma shared a deep love with both women; she also spoke to Valborg of “love letters” and called her a “writer’s wife”. There are also signs of jealousy between Elkan and Olander, so it was probably a complicated love triangle that ended with the death of Sophie Elkan in 1921.
“I see so many relationships between women in Copenhagen that I have to try to make sense of what nature is trying to achieve – and why shouldn’t we love everyone equally?”
Selma Lagerlöf, in a letter to Sophie Elkan
Nils Holgersson was not only the well-known title character from Selma’s novel, but also the author’s foster son . Presumably because of the coincidental similarity of names, she had been approached with a request to take him in. She was very committed to him and hoped that he might one day take over Mårbacka. However, these hopes were not realised: Nils emigrated to America, where he became involved in building skyscrapers.
Committed until the end of her life
Selma Lagerlöf was committed to the empowerment of women and gave the celebrated speech Hem och stat ( “Home and State”) at an international women’s congress in 1911, in which she contrasted the security and peace of a “female” created home with the creation of a state characterised by power and violence.
During the Nazi regime, she helped Jewish refugees and often sent money to people in need who sent her letters. Even during the Great Depression around 1930, she did not dismiss any employees, but even hired new ones in order to alleviate people’s suffering as best she could.
When Finland found itself in the Winter War with the Soviet Union in 1939, she supported the country financially by donating her gold Nobel Prize medal.
Shortly afterwards, in 1940, Selma Lagerlöf died of a stroke in her home at the age of 81. Her grave is in her home town of Östra Ämtervik.
What characterises her literature
What?
Selma Lagerlöf’s works are often events from her life or stories that were told to her, which she often supplements with mythical aspects and elements from popular belief.
She describes much of her native Värmland and often depicts Mårbacka in order to preserve the local way of life for the future. The estate is often idealised. In general, the home and the security associated with it play an important role, accompanied by the fear of losing this home. A fear that preoccupied Selma herself when she was young.
In addition, she often addresses the need to atone for guilt and the reconciling and redeeming power of love. She is also very interested in the human psyche and the depiction of states of mind. A confrontation between female and male roles is also a recurring motif in her works; either devoted, loving femininity is juxtaposed with cruel, devious masculinity, or strong, capable and self-confident women are told who have to assert themselves against incapable men.
How?
What characterises Lagerlöf’s works most strongly is their episodic structure. The chapters often tell stories that are self-contained, creating a serialised entanglement of events.
The marvellous, the folkloric and the inner emotional world were what she particularly emphasised in her storytelling. Her works often have a rather naive tone and sound like old tales passed down orally, which gives them a fairy-tale character. Critics have often labelled her, rather pejoratively, as sagotant (“fairy-tale aunt”).
However, her narrative style is finely crafted and creates sophisticated narrative constructs, for example through interwoven storylines and deliberate changes of narrative perspective.
Over the course of her life, her writing style changed from exuberant, narrative descriptions to more sober, calmer formulations.
Travelling destinations
In the footsteps of Selma Lagerlöf
The municipality of Östra Ämtervik in Värmland is the home of Selma Lagerlöf. The Mårbacka estate, which played an important role for the author throughout her life, is located here. She had stipulated that the estate should be preserved as a place of remembrance; the farm still exists today and is open to visitors. Guided tours of the house are offered, and there is also a café and a bookshop. The writer’s grave can also be found in Östra Ämtervik.
Falun in Dalarna was also a central place in Selma Lagerlöf’s life. She owned a small villa here and spent a lot of time with her sister and writing. The small town in the heart of Sweden is well worth a visit if you want to get to the bottom of the author’s attitude to life while travelling through the regions of Sweden.
Nils Holgersson sculpture
In Karlskrona in the south of Sweden, there is a small statue of Nils Holgersson called “Sprungen ur boken” (“Sprung from the book”). It was sculpted by Ralf Borselius and unveiled in 2006, exactly 100 years after the book was published.
