Selma Lagerlöf (1858 - 1940) was a Swedish novelist and writer whose fiction blended the landscape and oral traditions of her native Värmland with a lyrical, saga-like narrative style. In 1909 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1914 the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy. [1] Her best-known books include Gösta Berling's Saga and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. [2]
Early life and education
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858 at Mårbacka, the family estate in the parish of Östra Ämtervik in Värmland, western Sweden. A hip ailment in childhood limited her mobility and drew her towards reading and the stories told on the estate, which later supplied much of her material. [1]
Financial difficulties forced the sale of Mårbacka in 1885. Lagerlöf trained at the Högre lärarinneseminariet, a teachers' college in Stockholm, and worked for a decade as a schoolteacher in Landskrona while writing in her spare time. [2]
Literary career
Her debut novel, Gösta Berlings saga (1891), grew out of a magazine competition and told in episodic, heightened prose the story of a defrocked priest and the cavaliers of a Värmland ironworks. Its break with the prevailing naturalism of the day was initially divisive but soon won wide acclaim, and it remains her signature work. [2]
Later fiction included The Miracles of Antichrist, drawn from travels in Sicily, and Jerusalem (1901-02), based on a group of Swedish peasants who emigrated to the Holy Land. Commissioned by the National Teachers' Association to write a geography reader for schoolchildren, she produced Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-07), in which a boy shrunk to thumb size travels the country on the back of a goose. It became one of the most widely translated Swedish books ever written. [1]
Honours and public life
The Swedish Academy awarded Lagerlöf the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, citing the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterised her writing. [3] With the prize money and later earnings she bought back Mårbacka, restoring the estate and living there for the rest of her life.
She received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and Swedish and foreign decorations including Litteris et Artibus and Illis quorum, the Legion of Honour and the Order of the White Rose of Finland. In 1914 she took seat number seven in the Swedish Academy. [1]
Later years and legacy
Lagerlöf supported women's suffrage and spoke publicly against the rise of Nazism, helping writers and intellectuals escape Germany, among them the poet Nelly Sachs. She continued publishing into the 1930s, including the Löwensköld trilogy and volumes of memoir about Mårbacka. She died there on 16 March 1940. [2]
Her work made regional Swedish folklore into international literature and opened the Academy and the Nobel Prize to women writers who followed. Mårbacka is preserved as a museum, and Nils remains a staple of children's reading across Europe. [1]
