Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Lagerlöf: The Schoolteacher Who Rewrote Sweden

In 1902 the National Teachers' Association came to a middle-aged novelist with an unglamorous commission: write a geography primer for Swedish schoolchildren. What they got back was a boy shrunk to the size of a thumb, riding a domestic goose the length of the country. *Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige* is still in print in more than thirty languages, and it is the only textbook assignment in literary history to have produced a classic. It is also a fair description of how Lagerlöf worked: given a practical task, she reached for the fable.

Mårbacka

She was born on 20 November 1858 at Mårbacka, an estate in Värmland, the fifth of six children of Erik Gustaf Lagerlöf, a lieutenant in the Royal Värmland Regiment, and Louise Wallroth, from a merchant and foundry-owning family. A congenital hip injury and an illness at three and a half left her temporarily lame; she recovered, but the childhood was a quiet, indoor, reading one. Her grandmother's storytelling was the formative influence. At seven, having read Thomas Mayne Reid's *Osceola*, she decided to be a writer, and never revisited the decision.

She was schooled at home and picked up English and French. Her father opposed both her further education and her interest in the women's movement — a fact worth keeping in view alongside the tenderness with which she later wrote about him. From 1882 to 1885 she trained at the Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm, then took a post at a girls' secondary school in Landskrona, where she taught for a decade. In 1884 the family sold Mårbacka. The loss lodged deep, and getting it back became one of the organising projects of her life.

Gösta Berling and the Danish Rescue

She wrote her first novel while teaching. Submitting early chapters to a literary competition run by the magazine *Idun*, she won a publishing contract, and *Gösta Berlings saga* appeared in 1891, when she was thirty-three. Swedish critics were tepid. The book was saved from obscurity by Denmark: when Georg Brandes, the most powerful critic in Scandinavia, praised the Danish translation, Swedish opinion reversed itself and her reputation took off. Patronage from Fredrika Limnell allowed her to leave teaching in 1895 and write full time.

*Antikrists mirakler* (1897) was set in Sicily and built on an Italian legend about a substituted Christ Child, using it to stage a collision between Christian and socialist moral systems. Then came *Jerusalem* (1901–02), drawn from her 1900 visit to the American Colony in the city, about Swedish peasants who abandoned their farms for the Holy Land. Reviewers reached for comparisons to Homer and Shakespeare, and her reputation went international.

The Prize, and the Chair

On 10 December 1909 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterise her writings. The decision had been fought over inside the Swedish Academy; the citation's language is the residue of that argument, praising temperament rather than technique. Her acceptance speech was pure Lagerlöf: instead of a survey of her art, she narrated a visit to her father in heaven to thank the people who had helped her.

The Academy had already given her its gold medal in 1904. In 1914 she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy itself, holding Seat No. 7 until her death. Uppsala made her an honorary doctor in 1907, Greifswald in 1928; she received the Litteris et Artibus in 1909 and Illis quorum in 1926. With the Nobel money she bought back Mårbacka and lived there for the rest of her life.

Two Women, and the Vote

Lagerlöf met Sophie Elkan in 1894; Elkan became her closest friend, travelling companion and literary sounding-board, and their correspondence was published in 1993 as *Du lär mig att bli fri* — You Teach Me to Be Free. From the early 1900s she was also intimately involved with Valborg Olander, a teacher and suffrage campaigner who worked as her literary assistant and secretary; their letters, published in 2006 as *En riktig författarhustru*, contain passages of unmistakable erotic feeling. Both attachments were intense and possessive, and the rivalry between the two women was a permanent complication. Female homosexuality was socially unspeakable in the Sweden of the time, and neither relationship was ever publicly named.

She was openly active in the suffrage campaign. She gave the opening address at the International Suffrage Congress in Stockholm in 1911 and spoke at the victory celebration in May 1919 when Swedish women won the vote.

The Last Act

Her late work included the Löwensköld trilogy — *Löwensköldska ringen*, *Charlotte Löwensköld* and *Anna Svärd* — between 1925 and 1928, and several volumes of Mårbacka reminiscences published from 1922 to 1932. Shortly before her death she used her standing to intervene with the Swedish royal family on behalf of the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, securing asylum for Sachs and her mother; they left Germany on the last flight to Sweden. Sachs would win the Nobel herself in 1966. Lagerlöf died at Mårbacka on 16 March 1940, aged eighty-one.

Why Selma Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is narrative invention of an unusually primitive and powerful kind — primitive in the sense that it draws directly on the oral storytelling of her grandmother and the folk material of Värmland, rather than on the psychological realism that dominated European fiction when she began. The Swedish Academy named it vivid imagination and spiritual perception, and the phrase, vague as it is, identifies the right thing: her books work by legend, vision and supernatural machinery at a moment when serious novelists had abandoned all three. The *Nils Holgersson* commission is the clearest demonstration. Asked for a schoolbook, she produced a device — a shrunken boy on a goose — that solved the pedagogical problem and the artistic one at once, and she sustained it across the whole geography of a country.

The counter-case is real and the Nobel Foundation's own biography concedes part of it: none of her later works matched the power or the success of *Gösta Berlings saga*. She peaked early and repeated herself; the mysticism that thrilled 1900 can read as sentimental now, and her prose has been criticised as loose. Her 1914 election to the Academy and much of her subsequent standing were bound up with her position as a national symbol — the first woman in the Academy, later the first woman on a Swedish banknote — which is a form of eminence distinct from literary quality. The strongest honest claim is narrower than "great novelist" and more interesting: she was a great inventor of stories, working in a form most of her contemporaries had written off.

Legacy

Swedish cinema built its early reputation on her. Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller adapted her repeatedly in the silent era, and Sjöström's *Körkarlen* (1921), from *Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!*, remains one of the most influential films of the period; *Jerusalem* was filmed again to international acclaim in 1996. Sunne Municipality founded the Selma Lagerlöf Prize in 1983 for writers working in her spirit. In 1991 she became the first woman to appear on a Swedish banknote, the twenty-krona note. Mårbacka — bought, lost, and bought back — is a museum. In Jerusalem, a flight of steps carries her name.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1909
• Order of the Three Stars, 3rd Class — 1929
• Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav‎
• Notable work: Gösta Berlings Saga
• Notable work: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
• Notable work: Jerusalem