Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) was a Swedish author

Carina Burman

Translated by Sarah Death

FREDRIKA BREMER (1801-1865) was a Swedish author of international renown. Between 1828 and 1858 she published a large number of novels, short stories and travelogues, and in the 1830s her work started to appear in translation in other countries. Britain and the United States became her main markets abroad, and her work influenced many of the Victorian novelists, among them Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. The issue of women’s rights was her main concern, and her work had a great impact on Swedish and international suffrage campaigns and feminist ideology. Bremer's works still appear in new editions, in Sweden and to a lesser extent abroad.

The following three extracts are from Carina Burman's biography of Fredrika Bremer, Bremer: En Biografi (Bremer: A Biography). Bonniers, Stockholm, 2001. 618 pages. Colour plates; black and white illustrations. ISBN 91-0-057680-8.

The extracts reflect different phases of Bremer's life and works: her youth; her mature novels of the 1840s; and her journeys to the USA and Britain and the resulting travel writing. The translation into English is by Sarah Death.

The biography itself has copious notes but these have been omitted here.

from  CHAPTER 2

"Fredrice has spun together a Historie".

Debut as Artist and Writer, 1820-31.

p.41-43

Even in her youthful travel diary, Bremer emerges as a confirmed feminist. She often ridicules men and sees them as unworthy of women, who marry out of sheer goodness. In Göttingen she was impressed by the 300,000 volumes in the University Library, but then thought better of it and wrote to her female friend that there was no need to envy her:

Oh no, Agathe. If you had been there, you would have done as we did, opened your eyes wide, let your mouth gape open, cried Gracious me! and once you had read the Titles of a few of the Books, Medeçine, Chirurgie etc. would withdraw in indifference, for - you are a Woman, you are not permitted to be learned and should one presume to open a book, so perhaps the Professor would remind one that this collection did not contain any Cookery books! Ah, it is sometimes hard indeed to follow the motto: Content With Your Lot. 

But Fredrika was not content with her lot. The travel diary provides insight not only into what happened to her, but also into her thoughts and dreams. Despite the excitement of the journey, she longed to be elsewhere. In Switzerland she dreamt of secluding herself with her friend in "a little Hermitage" and devoting herself to "Painting, music, reading, the lofty pleasures of the arts combined with the more beautiful life of Nature." In the mountains she encountered some "cheerful and good-looking little Savoyard boys". In her travel notes they were little more than a picturesque detail, but the vision remained with her as a reminder of the contrast between their freedom and her own lack of it. The memory surfaced in 1834, in a letter to her long-time mentor Böklin, sighing: "Oh, how I envied the ragged little Savoyard among the Swiss mountains!" Much later, in Lifvet i gamla verlden (Life in the Old World, 1860; translated as Two Years in Switzerland and Italy, 1860), she still recalled them. The boys' freedom was in stark contrast to the claustrophobia of the Bremer family's closed carriage, and the adult Bremer spoke with some justification of "feeling blocked up" - though their comfortable form of travel did not actually impede her airways, it left her gasping for intellectual and spiritual breath.

Travel, it seems, was not much fun. Fredrika returns time and again in her notes to the food, and often grumbles about it. On one occasion she apologises for this to her addressee, but with the excuse, "You must know, my little one, that when travelling the meals are veritable high points." The Bremer girls may have gone dashing through Europe in a carriage, but they were just as constrained as back home. Propriety often obliged them to stay in their hotel, and if the carriage got stuck in the mud (as it often did) they were not allowed to alight however much they begged. Yet Bremer's major source of concern was still what she describes to her confidante Agathe as "little aggravations". Clearly the journey was not improving her father's moody temperament. Fredrika grew depressed, complained in her diary of her "indifference" and at the beginning of September fell ill with a bilious disorder. A little earlier, she described herself and other women as shackled: "truly we often resemble those lesser butterfly orchids which I have seen in the Fields so ensnared in Goosegrass that they cannot send up their modest flower therefrom, but must lie still along the ground." This sense of being bound seems deeply rooted in Fredrika and is reflected in numerous ways in the imagery found throughout her work.

One might almost suspect that her father’s tyranny was a contributing factor in driving Bremer to distraction and into her bilious attack. Her illness forced the family to slow the pace of their travels. They remained at Darmstadt for almost three weeks. The sisters read, went to the theatre and made excursions. Fredrika lay in her room attended by the doctor, Baron Wedekind, and hardly aware of her surroundings. Even once she had been declared fit and they had resumed their journey, she suffered bouts of melancholy and dwelt a great deal on death.

The travel diary ends in Lausanne on 12 October. Bremer's brother Claes was left in Geneva, where he was to complete his Grand Tour studying with a professor. A year earlier, he had enrolled at the University of Uppsala after successfully sitting the obligatory theological entrance examination. The rest of the family spent the winter in Paris, where the daughters' education was finished and polished. They attended theatrical performances and parties, and saw famous actors and opera singers: Talma, Duchesnois, Mlle Mars, Pasta and Mainville Féodor. The girls took lessons in music, drawing and painting from first-class teachers.

In Paris, the family lived at the Hotel de Bruxelles in Rue Richelieu. Napoleon had died in May of that year, and their ultra-Bonapartist guide, Clair, was constantly heard to maintain that everything was better "du temps de l'Empereur." This was the era of the Restoration. War and revolution were past, and a Capetian king was once more on the throne. Louis XVIII was the younger and cleverer brother of the executed Louis XVI and known as "le désiré", the desired one. The seventeenth Louis, son of Marie Antoinette, had in all likelihood died in 1795 at the age of ten. His uncle then declared himself king of France, but spent his manhood years in restless activity, conspiring against the enemies of the royal house.

Through contacts in the banking world, the Bremer family found their way into Paris society. Many years later, Fredrika recalled how she and her sisters played charades with the girls of the French Holtenmann family. But the city was most unlike the Stockholm they were used to. In Life in the Old World, Bremer describes the family at that time as "like some small Scandinavian craft thrown into the surging Paris sea and half-lost there." A middle-aged writer by then, she too allowed herself to be carried away on a wild flood of words when describing the scene:

Beauty and ugliness, luxury and misery were overtly displayed alongside each other. Splendid processions of people riding and in carriages thronged the boulevards; the crowd of spectators extended into the side alleys, where wretched creatures exposed open wounds and maimed limbs, women lay on the ground covered in black cloth, surrounded by pale, semi-naked children. The young gentlemen of the boulevard stepped right over them. Well-attired young men pursued women beseechingly; easy women could not keep their hands from the gentlemen. The evenings brought a swarm of human moths onto the streets; Palais Royal was a blaze of light, gambling clubs and dazzling shops; but after four in the afternoon it was dangerous for a young woman to cross its courtyard, even holding her mother1s hand.

With its refreshing fountains in the Tuileries, its throng of people, of laughing "pajazzos", old women making soup and much-beaten children, Paris was "a great, melodramatic piece of theatre, which left the young spectator almost dizzy in the head and made him [sic] laugh and cry at the same time."

These impressions were wide-ranging and educational. And yet the outcome of all these travels was not positive. In her autobiographical note, written in 1831, Fredrika writes that the impressions renewed the two passions of her childhood, the desire to know and the desire to enjoy. "I suffered like Tantalus," she concludes. In the ancient underworld, Tantalus was of course punished for crimes against the gods by having to stand in water beneath trees heavy with fruit, but finding that the branches raised themselves and the water ebbed away whenever he tried to eat or drink. The young Bremer was tortured by the same terrible hunger and thirst - not of the body, but of the soul. "Not for all the goods and gold in the world, not even for the poetic genius of Tegnér, would I wish to make such a journey in that way again", she wrote later in her autobiography. What is unusual is not that Bremer was discriminated against on grounds of her sex, but the intensity with which she felt herself oppressed and wronged. Even in her youth, she experienced a distinct sense of being an outsider. She was ugly, hopeless, rich - and a woman.

from CHAPTER 7

"Christ is the originator of true liberalism."

Religion, sex, philanthropy and politics 1842-48

p 226-29: A Diary

Bremer's early biographers Sophie Adlersparre and Sigrid Leijonhufvud see the winter of 1842 reflected in her ground-breaking theological essay Morgon-väckter (Morning Hours) and the winter of 1842 in En Dagbok (A Diary). Bremer now left behind her the concentrated action of Hemmet (The Home) and the picturesque fells and hills of Strid och Frid (Strife and Peace) and moved to her own home territory - the world of the capital city and its society. She also threw herself with energy and enthusiasm into her own social life, lived "in many-sided contact" with the world and was able to sum up the winter as "the most enjoyable, the most lively I have ever experienced". Bremer's urge to socialise came in part from working on the novel, and both she and her representatives combed Stockholm society for "folly and absurdity" to put into the book. From this point on, Bremer was to alternate the settings of her novels between upper class society and picturesque rural regions such as Dalecarlia, Norrland and the island of Gotland.

A Diary is mentioned for the first time in a letter of October 1841, when she has just set it aside to work on Morning Hours. Woman and man, love and emancipation are the novel1s themes. A Diary has none of the mildly incestuous love found in Famillen H*** (The H*** Family, re-translated as The Colonel1s Family 1995), nor does it share Grannarne's (The Neighbours') marital warmth or quest for purity. A number of literary historians have characterised A Diary as a "novel of intrigue", but for Bremer it was an entirely new departure. The question of women's rights was central to all her novels - somewhat less in Strife and Peace - but here, the issue of emancipation is brought to a head. A Diary depicts a wealthy 30-year-old woman, Sofia Adelan, who has been awarded legal majority status by His Majesty the King. Around her are a number of twenty-year-olds with thoughts of marriage, but she herself has no intention of relinquishing her independence - and yet falls in love with a mature widower.

A Diary is a novel of love in adulthood. Intrigue weaves itself about the younger generation - not least the somewhat manic-depressive Flora and the fawning St. Orme - but Sofia's love is the focus of interest. She, however, considers herself too old for such things. Her clothes are hopelessly old fashioned - "rococo", as her younger sister puts it - and so is she. Yet her fashionable stepmother takes a different view. Sofia is of "that beautiful, that modern age for an attractive woman" - she is a certain age, just like Balzac's women.

Bremer, too, had experienced a second youth at the age of thirty. Now she was ten years older and working on " a new romanticisation of everyday life". In a letter to Böklin in April 1842, she described in some detail the emotions this work was prompting in her:

Oh, Böklin! What days I have experienced this winter and spring! what fullness of life I have enjoyed. [...] In the mornings, between 8 and 1, I live among feelings and thoughts which are beyond description, which I should not permit myself to experience and relish in, were the pleasure not the basis of my activity on others' behalf [...].

In letters that followed, Bremer made various further comments on the book. In December 1842 she almost despaired, and on several occasions she likened the amorous theme of the book to "spirit-distilling of the mind". A Diary was nonetheless very close to her heart - its setting was identical to her own, its main character not unlike herself, and the emotions those she was attempting to suppress in her own life. In a letter to Böklin, she referred to the book as "a piece of personal confession: 'Dichtung und Wahrheit'." The act of writing it seems to have affected her to a remarkable degree. Whereas the writing of The Neighbours had made her fear dying, because the literary characters would die with her, the writing of A Diary found her living out all her characters' emotions. Fredrika Bremer's letters for the period 1842-43 often match the diary of Sofia Adelan word for word. Writing in September 1842 to her friend Malla Silfverstolpe, well-known hostess of a literary salon and herself constantly in love, Bremer quoted a song she had translated herself: "I care for no one at all, at all / if no one will care for me". Sofia Adelan uses the same song lyrics repeatedly as an expression of her own philosophy of life.

Nor was this correspondence between Bremer's personal and literary turn of phrase limited to the verbal sphere. Her description to Böklin of living "among feelings and thoughts" is borne out by her own later written accounts of the time. She wrote to Frances von Koch - her confidante in intimate matters - of life at her Årsta home in the summer of 1843:

Charlotte unravels tangled skeins of wool, while I write novels and conjure up flames of fictional love which at times virtually ignite me too, obliging me to throw myself into the sea every now and then for a refreshing bathe. N.B. not like poor Sapho!

Sappho of course drowned herself - according to unconfirmed reports - because she was unrequited in love. This confidence offered by Bremer to her friend, however, contrasts with a letter to the poet Tegnér in early May, in which she wrote: "a Diary with flames of love and passion, but I myself thereby as cool as - this current weather." It may simply have been that she felt it politic to keep Tegnér, now Lord Bishop in Växjö, at arm's length. There were more reliable allies to be had, like Malla Silfverstolpe.

During the summer of 1843, the two ladies discussed love in their letters. The salon hostess was not enamoured of emancipation, but she knew about love. They also had a shared anxiety on the subject: their good friend (and Malla's old flame) Adolf Fredrik Lindblad had fallen in love with Jenny Lind, who was living at his house. Bremer blamed herself, for having brought the couple together. In April 1843, she made what sounded like a definitive pronouncement on love: "I did not become happy until I looked for love not in another human being's breast as before but at - the feet of the Merciful One. Since then, all is calm and fulfilment."

By renouncing earthly love and concentrating on work and religion, Bremer had spared herself distress and attained harmony. But love was part of life. Working on A Diary reminded her of its existence.

[...]

A Diary is the first novel about a single woman to be written by a woman in Swedish literature. Women living alone had featured on the periphery of Bremer's books, especially The Neighbours, and C.J.L. Almqvist had written his infamous Det går an (It Can Be Done) about the unmarried Sara Videbäck, who opted to live in a free relationship with her man. On the second page of A Diary, the first-person narrator Sofia Adelan characterises herself: "Independent in fortune and position in life, I am now able to taste freedom after many long years of captivity, a freedom to follow, at the age of thirty, nothing but my own inclination."

The novel consists of Sofia's diary entries about her return to her stepmother's house, about her half sister Selma and cousin Flora, about the diplomat St. Orme with "the look of a slanderous snake" and the irreproachable "Viking" Vilhelm Brenner. In narrative technique, the book conforms to the usual conventions of the diary form. The novel is not divided into chapters and consists of entries dated from 1 November 18** to 17 May the following year. It features museum visits, grand balls, sledging parties and domestic visits - all one could wish for from stay in Stockholm society. A Diary is a dazzling portrait of Stockholm, and that in itself was enough to make the inhabitants of the capital want to read it. The depiction of subtle shifts wrought in the city by changing seasons and weather conditions is reminiscent of Balzac. The French author is indeed one of the names resonating through the novel. He is often referred to, and when a French novel is being discussed and criticised at one point, it is very probably one of Balzac's works that is implied.

from CHAPTER 9

"and the very air contained something so wonderfully vibrant, sparkling, young"

The Years in America 1849-51

and CHAPTER 10

"Everywhere I shall seek to see both the best and the worst"

Travel Writer, Philanthropist and Internationalist, 1851-54

p.325-332

Bremer went to America firmly resolved to study society and the position of women. Once there, she found she was also expected to take a stand in the slave question. She was thrown into a hectic round of socialising she had not foreseen, but also made new friends with whom she continued to correspond for the rest of her life. Marcus and Rebecca Spring even came to visit her in Sweden. Many of the male friends were writers, artists and other well-known names, but most of the female friends were "ordinary" women, wives and mothers, from intellectuals like Rebecca Spring and Maria Lowell to those with more concerned with the practical side of life, like Anne Howland in Charleston. They varied from women of Bremer's own age to young girls - in the north, in the south and in Cuba. Much could be said, and much has already been written, about Bremer's time in America, and the effect on her of its climate, people and literature. There is just as much to say about how she in turn influenced the view of America of her fellow Swedes and other Europeans - and the Americans1 view of themselves. There is enough material for a whole new book to cover this aspect of the subject "Fredrika Bremer and America".

The summer of 1850 was one of the most important periods in Swedish-American relations, at least in fictional terms, for that was the summer of Karl Oskar and Kristina's arrival in New York in Vilhelm Moberg's multi-volume emigrant epic. In the late summer of the same year, Fredrika Bremer's travels took her from Niagara to Wisconsin and out across the prairie. There she met Swedish immigrants and three generations of a family called Fairchild - mother, daughter and granddaughter. The episode came at the mid-point of her American journey and also found its way to the mid-point of her travelogue Hemmen i den nya verlden (The Homes of the New World, 1853-54).

The Fairchild family home lay on the edge of the prairie, and Bremer was invited to stay there. She was far away from Boston and Cambridge, far away from Emerson winning her over with a glass of fresh spring water. Here she encountered another America - the land of the pioneers and settlers. Bremer wrote in English in a letter to the daughter, Sarah Dean: "When I think of the sunflowers on the prairies of Wisconsin I see you among them, with your little one on your arm; and to that lovely image my thoughts often rivet, and it never goes out of my mind." Among all the splendid episodes in The Homes of the New World, those days in Wisconsin stand out as something special. The standard Bremer features are all there - the family, the sense of community, the charming children. But for once, the account stops in its tracks. The reader is allowed to pause and rest, listening not to some historical overview but to an archaic stillness. In this stormy American journey, the prairie was the calm point at the eye of the storm. It was composed of day-to-day peace and quiet, little children and huge sunflowers:

Why do I seek the temple of the sun shining high above the earth? Is not every sunflower a temple, more beautiful than those of Peru or Solomon? (The Homes of the New World)

There on the prairie, among the sunflowers, is the centre point of the American journey - in terms of chronology, length and perhaps spirit too.

On September 13 1851, Fredrika Bremer left America, showered with gifts from friends and strangers alike. Marcus and Eddy Spring waved goodbye as the steamer Atlantic put out, and soon forests and water were all that remained to be seen of the New World. She found herself "between two lifetimes and two worlds". Her time in America soon seemed like a dream, "a sun-drenched, burning, intensely vital dream." Now she could hear the call of the Old World.

The nineteenth century had entered its second half. In America, Melville's Moby Dick and Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin were appearing; in Italy, Verdi was composing Rigoletto; and in England, the architect Lewis Cubitt was putting the finishing touches to his design for King's Cross Station. Queen Victoria (1819-1901) would rule the British Empire for another fifty years. The industrialisation of her kingdom was complete, and the smoke hung thickly over London. Art was avantgarde, Pre-Raphaelite. Dickens was at the height of his career and the Brontë sisters had just embarked on theirs. The new Australian state of Victoria had proved rich in gold, a fact which was to have a greater impact on Bremer's work than she could ever have imagined. But as the Swedish authoress stepped ashore in England on 23 September 1851, after a sea crossing of only eleven days, the main topic of discussion was the Great Exhibition.

Europe had been toying with the idea of a world exhibition for some years. France saw itself as the obvious host, but the revolution of 1848 put paid to such ambitions. Instead, Queen Victoria's beloved consort Prince Albert took the initiative in arranging the Great Exhibition. It was a magnificent gesture, worthy of an empire where the sun never set. Klara Johanson, who edited and published Bremer's English travel writings in book form in 1922, calls the exhibition "the apotheosis of English success". The enormous Crystal Palace, the world's first piece of purely modernist architecture, was built specifically to house the exhibition. Its iron and glass structure consisted of a central arched hall flanked by wings with decorative towers. Those who saw the palace were enchanted and waxed lyrical about its beauty.

So even the outer shell of the world exhibition was exquisite, while inside the Crystal Palace, 13,900 exhibitors gathered. The whole world was exhibiting the products of its art and industry, from native canoes to over-refined artistic objects of western civilization, such as a pianino in the shape of an artichoke. Half the exhibition floor was reserved for the British Empire - chauvinistic perhaps, yet easy to understand in view of the sheer vastness of the area over which Victoria ruled. But the exhibition was also perceived as an emblem of a new and better age. The corn laws had been repealed, free trade flourished and England could afford to be a little less insular than before. The English tourist industry experienced its first boom, and the exhibition did wonders for Prince Albert's public image. Admittedly there were dissenting voices raised against the invasion of hordes of foreigners, and mumblings about revolution at the gates, but after the inauguration of the exhibition in May 1851, Albert's popularity in the country rivalled even that of Wellington, the Iron Duke.

In the course of the five and a half months it remained open, the exhibition had six million visitors, from Britain and abroad. Classes of London schoolchildren were admitted to the Crystal Palace free of charge, and an 84-year-old woman was said to have walked all the way from Cornwall to see it. Many came to England specifically to visit the exhibition, but Bremer was not one of them. It was never anything more than secondary in her eyes, though that did not stop her devoting a whole section to it in her account of her time in England.

Her primary reason for visiting England was a less obvious one - apart, of course, from the prosaic fact that England was on the way home to Sweden. What she evidently wished to study in England was industrialisation, socialism and the labour movement. In April 1851 she was planning a stay of a month or so. She wished to renew her acquaintance with her translators Mr and Mrs Howitt and the young lawyer and philanthropist Joseph Kay, and to meet the socialist writer Charles Kingsley. England, too, became the subject of a Bremer travelogue. England om hösten år 1851 was serialised in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, beginning in January 1852, and published as "England in the Autumn of 1851" in Sharpe's London Magazine, 1852. Bremer had apparently adopted the habit of making notes whenever she was travelling. She mentions travel notes from America, and copious notes survive from her journeys in the Old World, 1856-61. England in the Autumn of 1851 is written in the first person, but is closer in form to a piece of travel writing than to a set of private letters. Klara Johanson nonetheless categorises it as biographical, maintaining that none of her other writing "represents such an emphatic and fervent confession of her aspirations to understand life". Some private letters and a few eye witness reports from her time in England also exist, though they are far fewer in number than those from her American trip.

England welcomed Bremer with storms, rain and hail, but she had not come to admire the scenery. The steamer Atlantic docked in a location described by Bremer as "the manufacturing districts", and her first goal was to study industry and the effects of industrialisation. As a believer in progress, Bremer was interested in how things had developed in England. Two years before she had found the country in the grip of a cholera epidemic. In just a few days, she had seen more suffering than in all her ten months in Denmark, and had imagined she could hear the laments of the child workers from the "factories". Now, the employment of the youngest children had been abolished. Children were permitted to work in industry from the age of ten, but a half-day's schooling was often provided at their workplace.

In Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, Bremer visited factories, worker's housing and "ragged schools". Swedish industry was still undeveloped, and it is significant that Bremer uses the archaic term "manufacturing". In Sweden, industrial development had only reached the manufacturing phase, "a transitional stage between craftsman trades and the full operation of factories."

In the industries of England, Bremer could discern new hope for humanity. And yet she missed the patriarchal model of mutual dependence she was used to at home on the Årsta estate. The factory owner hired workers, but took no responsibility for them. Though the workers seemed healthy and the factories not exactly unpleasant, Bremer found it hard to come to terms with the working conditions there. In the textile factories of Manchester she noted "the strenuous attention" the women paid to their work. "They allowed themselves no time to look up, let alone turn their heads to talk. Their lives seemed to hang by the cotton threads." It was just as bad for the men, who sometimes existed only as "a screw or limb" in a machine. That was why, Bremer said, it was every factory worker's dream to leave the city and buy a little house in the country.

America had hailed Bremer as a celebrity. England adored her no less. She was lauded in the press, and offered a (presumably metaphorical) "cherished fireside seat". Bremer, however, had had enough of society life, and her stay in America had taught her to put her foot down. She therefore relinquished the warmth and comfort of the fire in favour of factory floors and slums.

England reaped the harvest of seeds sown in America. In America, there were still hints of the little old lady in what Bremer wrote; but in England, that tone had given way to mature social observation, and a receptivity even to subversive modern theories. Klara Johanson speculates in her "Orientation guide" to England in the Autumn of 1851 that one of Bremer's study visits to Manchester could have taken her to the Ermen & Engels cotton mill, one owner of which had recently written a revolutionary text with a colleague named Marx, although his appearance bore no resemblance to that of a "refugee hero of the revolution". Bremer was, after all, well read in socialism. Just as in America, her private letters differed from her published travel writings - but in this case it is the letters which are obliging and decorous, whilst the travel writing is suffused with social awareness which sometimes turns to anger. This is not the amiable narrator of Midsommarresan (Midsummer Journey), but the social reformer of Syskonlif (Brothers and Sisters).

The normally staunchly royalist Bremer took exception to the enormous sums of money Victoria and the Prince Consort had spent on stables and kennels.

What? £119,000 on stables and kennels, for the entertainment of fine horses and dogs - and this at a time when Ireland is starving, or forced to emigrate in dire poverty; when in England itself there is still an infinite amount to be done for human beings - when so unimaginably much could be done for the common good with these sums?!

Such things have sparked revolution before now, Bremer maintains. When she heard her English friends saying what a good example the Queen was to her subjects, she was sceptical. It seemed to her that the Queen was dancing on the very edge of the abyss with her "light foot - a darling little foot it is said to be."

Queen Victoria was thus not one of the sights Bremer felt drawn to seek out. But the Victorian age was so synonymous with its queen that she was hard to avoid. An author with a worldwide reputation like Bremer's would no doubt have been granted an audience, but she had no wish to meet the Queen. She was curious to see what she looked like, however. Her account of her stay in England describes a visit to Windsor with the authoress Anna Maria Hall. There, Bremer's beloved Swedish umbrella conveniently happened to fall out of her carriage into the Queen's path. As Bremer retrieved it, the Queen, out riding, galloped by with a smile - and that smile reconciled Fredrika with Victoria.

This sounds like a story arranged for literary purposes, but Mrs Hall's account confirmed the meeting, and fact is sometimes stranger than fiction. Meeting the Queen and feeling something of her "magical power" made Bremer more mildly disposed and willing to forget the disharmony sown earlier in her tale by the stables and kennels. In keeping with the ideals of her time, she did not like things that were thorny, ugly or disharmonious, and her writings always have a harmonious ending.

Carina Burman, Ph.D, Assistant Professor at Uppsala University, has written extensively on 18th and 19th century literature. In 2001 she published Bremer: En Biografi, a biography of Fredrika Bremer. She is also a well-known novelist. Her fifth novel, Babylons gator: Ett Londonmysterium (The Streets of Babylon: A London Mystery) was published in 2004 by Albert Bonniers förlag. Carina Burman is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a corresponding member of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland.