A Contemporary from Last Century
 

Let us imagine our international, contemporary literary celebrities -authors, critics, publishers -at some conference, in New York, Paris or Beijing, gathered to discuss some dear and topical subject: literature's limits, its masks, escapism or social responsibility, or its role in world peace.
   Let us make a small inquiry among them: who was Fredrika Bremer? Will there be a complete silence? No, some of them seem to remember. A Scandinavian woman who wrote novels in the 1800s?
   Swedish? A forerunner, in a way to the English Brontë sisters? A representative of the "Women's Lib" of her time? Maybe someone knows even more: did not this Fredrika Bremer write a travel book about America, not too long after Alexis de Toqueville's famous De la Démocratie en Amérique?
   Quite right. Fredrika Bremer is not forgotten. But the fact is that if the question had been put to the same kind of people a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, no one would have hesitated. At that time Fredrika Bremer was well-known outside her country. Sometimes her readers at home in Sweden complained that her works had been published in English or German before they came out in Swedish.
   All of the subjects that I imagine an international literary conference today would have on its agenda, interested Fredrika Bremer. She occupied herself with contemporary social and political questions and she was one of the most widely traveled persons of her time.
   When she arrived in New York in 1849, people were virtually queuing up at her hotel to shake her hand, ask for an autograph, or invite her home. Although she did not know a single American at her arrival, she was never without a place to stay during the almost two years that her journey lasted.
 
 

                                    Her First Works
 

Fredrika Bremer was born in 1801 in Finland, at that time still under Swedish rule. The family moved to Sweden when she was very young.
   She was approaching her thirties before she entered public life. Outwardly her debut was successful. Around 1830 the novels started to come out which the unkown author -she published anonysmously -had given a telling subtitle: "Sketches of Every-day Life". It was not long before her identity was revealed. She received a gold medal from the Swedish Academy, and her "Sketches" came in a long succession: The H-Family, The President's Daughters,The Neighbors and The Home, to mention the most important.
   Their popularity shows that the author was able to offer the reading public something new: novels in which they could recognize their own lives. Her subtitle pointed to a new literary genre. In the handbooks she is found under headings like "liberalism" or "realism" in contrast to a description like "romanticism".
   Her readers were often women. They understood that she depicted women's lives, pains and joys as no one hade done before. Through her books the family, the household, love entanglements, and the psychological relations between men and women became new literary themes. Her entrance into literature marks the birth of the bourgeois novel in Sweden. It can be described as the dean of Swedish literary history, Henrik Schück, has done: "Before her time the novel in Sweden had been more or less pleasure reading, a literature of which the educated classes were almost ashamed. Fredrika Bremer gave the novel a philosophical content, it became a part -and an important part -of the cultural development. It was ennobled, so to speak."
 
 

                            Journey to the New World
 

When Fredrika Bremer arrived in New York in 1849 she was nearly fifty years old. She was short of stature, unpretentious in her external appearance, dressed in black, and wearing a laced bonnet over her hair. She traveled alone. The world -and she herself -did not consider her a beauty. Many found her "dreadfully plain" in her appearance according to Catharine Sedgwick, at that time the most widely read American woman writer, and one of those who met the Swedish writer in New York.
   But it was a simplicity they would learn to appreciate, and although there was a great sorrow in the voice of Fredrika Bremer, one could intercept "a sparkle in her, a ripple of humor, and a brush of irony betokening anything but a crushed spirit," as Sedgwick wrote.
   Fredrika Bremer did not make the journey to America in order to be looked at or to answer questions from interviewers. She had a certain purpose, and the destination of her travels was not chosen by chance. She wanted to look into the future of mankind. She wanted to scrutinize the American utopia.
   During her two years in America she was constantly on the move. She traveled to the north to visit the Indians, to talk to them or make sketches of them, for she always carried her sketchbook with her. She traveled south along the Mississippi to meet slaveowner families, but was at least as interested in the slaves. She wanted to know how they lived, how they were treated, and to hear their stories about their own lives.
   She climbed up to the Capitol in Washington to listen from the public gallery to the arguments about the hottest question of the day, slavery, and took painful note of the concessions in the current law to the Southern slaveowners. Slavery was the big blot in the records of this America which offered a freedom which in other respects her Europe was lacking.
   She was passionately interested in America's many "societies". She visited Quakers and Shakers. She looked up settlers and descendants of Swedes. She listened to sermons in all kinds of churches. She wanted to find out how the prisons were organized, and she talked with the prisoners. She wanted to know about the opportunities for education and work for women.
   She walked into that notorious district Five Points in New York to look at the slums: prostitutes, deviates and homeless people. She visited American literary colleagues -Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, Washington Irving -in their homes, sketched them, read their books in depth, and argued with them. She especially observed American homes: their everyday life, expectations, women's roles, and social life.
   She extended her travels to Cuba where she stayed a few months during the spring of 1850. All the time she sketched. And she constantly recorded -spontaneously and vividly -impressions and reflections of what she saw. It was done in long letters home, mostly to her younger sister Agathe.
   Dear Agathe! When after her return to Sweden she edited her travel impressions, she kept the letter form. The Homes of the New World. Impressions of America, in several volumes, was published on both sides of the Atlantic during the first years of the 1850s.
   The reception of this work in the United States was mixed; some of her readers were shocked by her candidness. The letters are a mirror of the contemporary society, and the families she had stayed with are portrayed. In Sweden the work became a success.
   Fredrika Bremer had been the author of the home and the family and had been criticized occasionally for the limited social importance of the aristocratic or bourgeois settings which she depicted. In her novels of the 1830s the home had been described as a world. Now she described the world -America -as a home, and humanity was her subject. Her America-letters are written in a rapid impressionistic style, following the chronology of her travels. They are a living and incomparable document from the time of the American melting pot at the middle of last century. In the language of our time they could be called a journalistic achievement. There is no doubt, however, that her letters are characterized by a very determined view of life and by a reflecting intellect which make them into something more and greater than momentary impressions. They mirror not only America but also their author.
 
 

                             Travels to the Old World
 

Fredrika Bremer was to repeat this journalistic feat. Some years later she again left Sweden. This time she was absent for five years and would be sixty years old on her return to Sweden. She went first to Switzerland, then to Belgium and France, from there to Italy and the Pope's Rome, to Palestine and the Holy land, and to Turkey and Greece.
   As in America she let no obstacles stop her curiosity. She traveled in all possible ways: by ship, by train, by horse and wagon, or when necessary on horseback, as in the rough regions she visited in the Middle East. Later travelers have journeyed in her footsteps and been amazed at the physical hardships that she had been able to endure.
   This time also she was motivated by personal interests. In Switzerland she wanted to explore the new "free church" and the modern liberal theological currents. In Rome she became absorbed in a study of the differences between the Lutheranism in which she had grown up and Catholicism and had the opportunity to discuss these questions with the Pope during a visit to the Vatican. In Jerusalem she followed the wanderings of Jesus Christ. Greece was in many ways the highpoint of her journey, and she was to stay there for several years.
   People, landscapes, questions of the time; history, art and religion. The result of this long journey was a work in six volumes about life in the Old World (1860 -62). Although this travel book does not have the form of letters but of a diary, it is as freshly observing and at the same time reflecting and commenting as the letters from America. With these works -and, one might add, the book about England for which she gathered material during her voyage home from America and which is called Englandin 1851 - Fredrika Bremer places herself among the great travel book writers of the last century.
   In Sweden Fredrika Bremer worked within a tradition following the scientist and traveler Carl von Linné whom she admired. She too was interested in botany, as can be seen from her many drawings, but her field of study was the development of society and social life. Her travel books are part of what she considered her life project: the search for a tenable life philosophy. It has taken time, and perhaps only today is it possible, to comprehend how coherent and consistent her life and authorship really were.
   The fact that she was able to give such a vivid and stratified picture of the America and Europe of her time, that she could describe the life of society both from the bottom and from its ruling class, and that she was able to go beyond class and sex barriers as she did, had without doubt to do with what ought to have been her greatest obstacle at that time: the fact that she was a woman, and that she traveled alone.
   In an almost miraculous way she turned her biggest handicap to advantage. How did it happen, who was she, this Miss Bremer?
 
 

                   Departure from a Strait-jacket Upbringing
 

Even those of her countrymen today who have not read Fredrika Bremer, tie her name to the long political struggle which finally led to legal majority for women in Sweden. Because of her they probably also know something about the rigidity which marked the education of girls from her class: the daughters of the upper middle class.
   Fredrika's upbringing was in accordance with the times: a rigid set of norms, exercised in a social isolation so strict as to resemble life in prison. The Bremer family had five daughters -and four of them remained single. In one sense their childhood and adolescence were privileged, perhaps even a good example: they were taught drawing and foreign languages, they took lessons in dance and music, and they were instructed in modern literature - the dramatic works of Schiller were read aloud when the family met in the evenings in the drawing-room of the castle of Årsta, where the Bremer family spent the summer half of the year, or in the elegant apartment in Stockholm.
   But it was an upbringing focused on teaching how to please, with ideals which could be found in Madame de Genli's once so popular novels. In the case of the Bremer sisters it was executed in an atmosphere of insensitivity and extreme duress. Apparently it was even physically dangerous to their health; to all appearances the Bremer sisters suffered from severe undernourishment because of the meticulous restrictions in their food consumption. They were to grow into sylphs according to their mother's concept of beauty. They were kept inside the four walls of their home; even a walk outdoors was an unattainable dream. No real food for the soul, no intellectual help to wrestle with existential questions, were offered. Although the family was rich, it was not until she began to earn money from her books that Fredrika had any money to call her own.
   A distressing letter from Fredrika Bremer to her mother, written when she was already a recognized writer with a considerable reputation, contains the humble request for some litte space to call her own -  even if only a cubby-hole in the attic - where she might think and write. This request was refused. Echoes of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own are to be found in women's literature all through the ages.
   The legal incapacity of the unmarried woman made Fredrika totally dependent: she was not allowed to manage her own money, nor marry without the permission of her guardian, and she had, of course, absolutely no political influence. In addition, all higher education was closed to women.
   It has been suggested that this situation explains the large proportion of women writers in the bourgeois literature of the 19th century: it was simply a field where they could make themselves heard when other means were closed. At the same time women writers were the first to formulate new and subtle insights about shifts in the life of society which neither contemporary philosophy nor science were able to capture.
   A new audience was coming into existence, a reading middle class. The novel became the area where the contradictions of the time could be shown. The novel became a focal point for social debate and discussions of ethics; finally it became the very instrument for social change (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is an illuminating example).
   The childhood and youth of Fredrika Bremer is classic. We recognize its elements in the situation of other women writers from the same time. Less classic perhaps in the psychological constellation. which happened to exist in her family. Her father was not only a patriarch of the old school; he also happened to be a man of an unstable psyche, and his despotism was reinforced by periodical and severe depressions. His periods of silence and bad temper increased the isolation of the family and the vulnerability of the daughters.
   A psychologically complicated web arose: rebelliousness and inner revolt on Fredrika's part, but at the same time feelings of suffocation, consciousness of guilt and longing for reconciliation. Her youth passed through years of apathy and depression; without any light, without any hope, as she herself has put it.
   But it was from this childhood and youth that she took material for her writing. In her novels from the 1830s we sense her biography, but now transformed by a fresh and humorous eye. No one has with greater passion and warmth than she -in diaries and letters -expressed how a misguided upbringing and lack of love can shatter a young person's courage to live.
   In Sweden, her novels have often been read against the background of her biography. And naturally she deals with a personal trauma in them; in various parts of her novels her very complicated relationship with her father is noticeable. Still, it is remarkable and noteworthy how free as an author she stands from the reality of her own life and background. Already at her debut she was on her way to find a personal philosophy which would help her not only to understand and explain her own life, but also to make her into a real artist.
 
 

                                 Form and Style
 

Many of the women writers who were contemporary with Fredrika Bremer are today considered to belong to trivial literature. Fredrika, however, succeded in finding a formula for her novels which raised them above the trivial: a combination of high and low, or an "ideal realism", which neither allowed the subject-matter to be reduced to clichés, nor gave it the artificiality which quickly becomes dated.
   Obviously Fredrika Bremer's novels may to a reader of today sometimes appear "chatty" or "romantic". Critics usually explain this by pointing out that she did not yet master realism but remained in the imaginary world and style of romanticism. This is an interpretation which to my mind obscures her originality. A modern school of study in Sweden, often represented by women, has recently started to uncover the underlying structures in the works of Fredrika Bremer.
   There exists in her novels a realistically and soberly observing eye and a profoundly personal voice. To whom does it belong? One of Fredrika Bremer's strokes of genius as a writer was her introduction of the female narrator, the eye through which her families are described and scrutinized. In The H-Family this narrator has a revealing name, Beata Hvardagslag (Beata Everyday). In other novels she has a less symbolic name but the same function.
   Through the narrative voice a distance is achieved and also a chance to play with form. Fredrika Bremer's novels fluctuate between epic story-telling, dramatic dialogues, parts of letters, even inserted poems. The reader senses that this is fiction, art. But behind the female fictional narrator there is another, "the author" of the book, who in urgent moments may push aside the narrator to communicate something in earnestness or in confidence.
   The voice of the author may be heard when the narrator's perspective by necessity becomes too limited. While Fredrika Bremer's narrator stands for much of the realism and soberness in the novels -in accord with a large part of her contemporary readers -the voice of the author supplies something else: the myth, a larger and broader interpretation of existence.
   Recent Bremer research has shown -contrary to biographical reading or social interpretation of the message of this authorship -that Fredrika Bremer's novels use several codes simultaneously; its complexity is deeper than a breach of style between "romanticism" and "realism".
   She smuggled, as the literary scholar Birgitta Holm has expressed it, contraband into literature: a message in several strata. She gave to the grammar of the novel a new and unexpected "pattern of inflection." The message was coded, but in one way or other it had to do with liberation: her own, women's and finally humanity's.
   She could not speak out in plain language. The times did not allow it. Perhaps she herself in addition was too complicated a person. In any case, this is what saves her work from relegation to the ranks of fast forgotten trivial literature.
 
 
 

                     Father Revolt and Theological Questions
 

"All my youth was strange -I had a constant feeling of being able to go mad suddenly and instantly," Fredrika wrote in 1832 in a letter to the friend who perhaps meant more for her development than anyone else. His name was Per Johan Böklin and he was a young minister and teacher in the southern Swedish city of Kristianstad. They met by chance when she came to spend the winter with her sister who hade moved there with her husband. She was to study philosophy under his guidance, and asked him for help in putting her thoughts in order, which due to lack of systematic studies she found confused.
   Her meeting with Böklin and the death of her father -which occurred around the same time -were two decisive milestones in the life of Fredrika Bremer. Under the leadership of Böklin she studied Plato and Herder, became familiar with Hegel's philosophy of history, and for the first time in her life she had the opportunity to discuss the theological questions which had become stumbling-blocks for her.
   Who was God? A capricious father, indifferent to the suffering to which the living beings in His creation were exposed? A dark despot, a self-sufficient sovereign who demanded blind and unreasonable obedience? Was it His will that women were subordinate to men, as she had read in the Scriptures? What did the words of the Bible mean, how should they be interpreted? How to explain the existence of evil, how to understand the torments of the innocent, the animals, and the nature?
   She could not have found a better sparring partner for her trying questions than Böklin: well-read and broadminded, politically radical, a minister in the Lutheran Church but influenced by the new Platonism and Christian mysticism, as well as deeply convinced of the equal worth of men and women in the face of Our Lord. Not least important was that he showed her the road to another aspect of God, namely Christ. That is to say, God in human shape, once subject to the same conditions and the same sufferings as human beings.
   One of Fredrika Bremer's most central and most forgotten books -never republished -is called Morgonväkter (Morning Watch, 1842). In reality it is a religious pamphlet directed against a work much debated at the time, Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Christ) by the liberal theologian D.F. Strauss.
   Here Fredrika Bremer accomplishes a delicate balance. She herself was extremely broadminded, according to many almost heretical, in questions of the Christian religion. Strauss's reading of the Bible was partly her own: that the Bible has mythical elements, that old materials have survived undigested in the New Testament, and that the gospels are marked by human shortcomings in their authors.
   On one point, however, she is unrelenting in her criticism: namely Strauss's view of Christ as the ideal man; i.e. the elimination of the miraculous and the divine. If Christ was only a human being, and if God was something else than Christ -he would then again be the "oriental despot" on an invisible throne, a gentleman whom Fredrika Bremer declares she can neither honor and love, nor obey: "I have said it, and I repeat it: the man Jesus Christ means more to us than God if he himself is not -God!"
   Her theological pamphlet, which attracted attention not least because it was written by a woman, was given the subtitle "Confession." That was also what it was. Here we have her view of life in a concentrated form. She is a Christian mystic, like Kierkegaard -whose writings interested her and about whom she wrote -convinced that eternity exists side by side with the temporal, and that divine grace can surround us in short and amazing moments of our life.
   Even in Fredrika Bremer's most soberly realistic novels the transcendence of the miracle is a sounding-board, and when she writes about political reforms it is with a spiritually transformed humanity as objective. Her Christian belief was, however, not especially pious, and at the end of her life she still called herself a sceptic and a searcher. She was unsympathetic to the worldly power of the Church.
   The conversations she had begun with Böklin in Kristianstad touched her own weak spot: the dark and difficult father figure who demanded blind obedience, and the rejected child's burning desire for love. But they also laid the foundation for her way of thinking -a freely perceived Christian faith -which fundamentally questioned the order of the patriarchal society, its economic laws and inequality. She can be called a "Christian socialist," which in any case is a label nearest to her politcal belief. During the 1830s she was indeed influenced by Bentham, and she knew Marx, but utilitarianism or Marxist historical materialism could not satisfy her, since her own social utopia contained a spiritual dimension lacking in both of them.
   This dimension is evident in her novels from the 1840s, The Bondmaid, A Diary, or Brothers and Sisters. The latter is an attempt to depict a utopia founded on sisterhood and brotherhood, where philanthropic movements, social associations or societies are implements for changing conditions. As a realistic model it is awkward and immature, but the direction in which her thoughts were moving is obvious. Her long travels out into the world were now being prepared.
   Böklin remained her friend for life. Their relationship was, however, disturbed by his proposal of marriage. It created a severe crisis for her and made their contact impossible for several years. Usually it is said that she chose to live alone in order to be able to accomplish her literary work. Perhaps this is true. It was still almost impossible to be a wife, mother and housewife and at the same time complete a literary life work.
   When it comes to this somewhat dark point in Fredrika Bremer's life it is, however, difficult not to have some thoughts: so many of her novels circle in different ways around the forbidden and dangerous love for the father/the despot. Already in The H-Family this constellation appears in the young woman Elisabeth's ecstatic and life-consuming passion for her guardian, her uncle. It is a passion which threatens to ruin the marriage and the domestic happiness which Fredrika Bremer otherwise voices in her novels from the 1830s. This part of the book belongs to what is usually called too romanced or romantic in her -that wich breaks up the frame of realism.
   It is possible that she here faced something that she was forced to express, but which in reality disturbed and threatened her attempt to establish a harmonic view of life: the obscure and incomprehensible sensation that the oppressor and the despot can excite passion and ardor in the victim.
   In any case, one must perhaps percieve that the mild and considerate Böklin -and according to her own description sometimes rather dull -was not the man that Fredrika Bremer's livelier temperament and more passionate spirit demanded. She did not find that kind of man and remained single. The crisis-inflicted break-up with Böklin took time to heal.
   Fifteen years were to pass before they met again, but they continued their correspondence; the letters they exchanged and which have survived are warm and sincere, giving us a vivid picture of Fredrika Bremer's life and development. Not unexpectedly, she belonged to the great letter writers of her time, and her correspondence with frineds and colleagues in Sweden (Tegnér, Geijer, Viktor Rydberg, just to mention a few) and in other countries (H.C. Andersen, Henri-Frédéric Amiel) belongs to Swedish literature as much as her novels and travel books.
 
 

                          Hertha and Women's Liberation
 
 

At the end of her life Fredrika Bremer wrote in a letter that with one of her books she had risked - "no, sacrificed" - her popularity as a writer. Conscious of that while she was writing it, she confided in her addressee: "that I still did it has since made me happy and will make me happy until my death".
   The book she is referring to is the novel Hertha or the Story of a Soul, which she wrote between her two extended travels abroad. It was published in 1856. At that time she was in Switzerland and did not have to partake in the pungently critical, partly downright rude reception her book received in Sweden. The liberal press supported her, but in the conservative press the criticism was relentless.
  Hertha deals with women's liberation. With a subtle but meaningful change in the subtitle she had chosen for so many of her novels, "Sketches of Every-day Life," she named it on the first page "A Sketch from Real Life." In an afterword she gives a report of the way in which the Courts of Appeal, the Supreme Court and Parliament in her country had treated the proposals for female legal majority of age from 1832 to date. She gives an account - with bitterness and bite - of all the winning arguments against such a reform and even makes a direct parallel: "Quite the same reasonings we have listened to in North America's slave states in arguments for the maintenance of slavery. It was all for the benefit and happiness of the slaves!"
   In her voice there is nothing of the compromise or understanding so very much present in her earlier family novels; here the polemical Fredrika Bremer speaks: "It seems to us difficult to tell for which of these two, the woman or the man, the opinions of their courts are most humiliating; for her who 'de jure' by force will be kept bound, in order that she might as married be fully submissive to her husband's guardianship, or for him who cannot in his bride try to win the free woman who through her full and free acknowledgement of his worth gives him her hand but an unfree, subjugated being who takes him because she has no other means of making a living or achieving a relatively independent existence. Completely free she can hope to become only through his death or by divorcing him. That is why I have heard more than one young, intelligent woman say: 'I would marry today if I only knew for sure to become a widow before night'."
  Hertha starts like so many of Fredrika Bremer's novels as a divertissement in the bourgeois society. But very soon behind the erotic complications another theme is noticeable. She tells how Herta and her beloved do not "get each other" - because of a father who does not want to let his daughters marry in order not to lose the right to their inheritance from their mother (a quite realistic reason for the resistance to the majority for women). For Hertha this leads to a maturing process. Before she dies she has founded a free school for young people - not only for women but also for the young men whose education does not teach them anything about real life or their own inner life. And she does not do it alone but together with the man whom she finally marries.
   The intimacy between these two - the fact that Hertha at one time bandages the knee of her fiancé - was enough to raise a storm in the conservative press. But Fredrika Bremer had more to offer, among other things a dream vision of female spirits who could find no other way of achieving a taste of freedom than through prostitution. In the novel she is loyal to the unmarried mother who alone takes care of her child. She praises work - and cooperation. She draws the contours for a pedagogy of freedom, maturity and human growth.
   She was right: with this book she risked her popularity as a writer. Certainly, she had "preached" also in her earlier novels. But that could be swallowed. In literary handbooks Hertha has until our days often been considered artistically unfinished because of its "tendency." The judgement is, however, unfair. Fredrika Bremer describes or depicts as much and with the same stylistic means as in her earlier novels; the variations in her narrative technique are of the same kind, and the only thing that really separates Hertha from the earlier novels is the degree of seriousness.
   Recently the mythological theme of the novel has been the subject of special interest: Fredrika Bremer was passionately interested in myths: Scandinavian fairy tales, Nordic sagas, Greek mythology. In Hertha there is evidence of her knowledge of Cretan fertility myths and matriarchal religions. Behind the "tendential work" something else is obviously apparent: an attempt at a reconciliation between life principles on the most profound level, a revision of the patriarchal image of the world which we seem to have inherited from Christianity or the Judeo-Christian culture.
   And still earlier, during her American journey, it is possible to intercept her - perhaps half subconscious -  search for another archetype. Her letters from Cuba are permeated with impressions from nature, mirroring a world in balance between male and female elements; a harmonic androgynous world. She interpreted and described Cuba as an human Eden, an original paradise. Sensitively she registered the dances of the Blacks - most probably with elements from the myths of the Yoruba religion - where male and female balanced each other, and where another and more primordial web of conceptions could be seen.
   There are reasons to believe that she, under the surface, allowed her innermost dreams of a rebirth of humanity to enter Hertha. But the novel was also immediately recognized as the foremost pamphlet against the want of majority for women. The first reform came just two years later, in 1858. The novel did not bring this about, but was undoubtedly a part of the political work behind it. As Hertha in the novel must go directly to the king with her prayer for change, Fredrika Bremer herself had used her authority to influence the stand of the monarch and thereby the resolution in Parliament.
   While she was writing Hertha, Fredrika Bremer had also entered public politics in a different way than earlier. In 1854 she published an appeal to the women's organizations of her country to unite and work for peace - the Crimean War was in process. And somewhat later she sent to the London Times an "Invitation to a Peace Alliance" directed to all the Christian women's organizations of the world.
   Her article could be read in The Times on August 28, 1854. In the same issue the editorial dissociation from such a foolish proposal was published. It was echoed by the Swedish press in scornful remarks, as was also her work for better prison care and pensions for women teachers. Thus, she was somewhat prepared for the public storm her novel Hertha was to stir up.
   Obviously the assault on her also had other grounds: her rigid and backward Sweden was undergoing great change. The class society  - nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants - in which she had grown up and which had kept her in such a painful isolation, was near its end. The political contrasts were harsh, and Hertha landed in the frontline.
 
 

                              Posthumous Fame
 
 

Fredrika Bremer died in 1865, only a few weeks after the victory of the reform which replaced the four estates with a more modern representative democracy. At Årsta, where she had retired, she listened carefully to the rumble from the debates in Stockholm. She received the news of the successful parliamentary reform from her friends, who after the announcement proposed a toast to Fredrika Bremer. It seemed natural. Both directly through articles and personal influence and indirectly she had worked for an increase of political democracy. If the message in Hertha was equality between the sexes, in practice it demanded political reform: majority for everyone, including women. Fredrika Bremer had worked at times patiently, at times in an indignant voice for these reforms.
   "A hearty thank you for the toast," she wrote from Årsta. "Thank God, I feel I can accept it with a clear conscience. Yes, I have worked for these things. But I could have done it better, more evenly. But it is not so easy to get out of centuries' old swaddling-clothes in which you have been tied up since your childhood, and moreover the true and good resignation stands quite near the false one."
   She was deep into a new work, a novel which was to have the title Aurora -red light of dawn. It was not to be finished; death intervened. For quite some time Årsta had not belonged to the family, but she rented a couple of rooms from the new owners. With them and a large group of children from the poor cottages around the castle she had celebrated Christmas. After the early service on Christmas Day she became ill from pneumonia. She died within a week. People from the region carried her coffin on the snowy roads, strewn with spruce twigs, to Österhaninge churchyard where she was buried.
   The most beautiful obituary about her was written long after her death by her fellow writer and Nobel prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, who was only seven years old when Fredrika Bremer died. In a short story called Miss Fredrika, Selma Lagerlöf pays tribute to her as a pioneer and explorer. She lets her be honored by all unmarried women of her time, whose lives she gave worth and dignity, and to whom Selma Lagerlöf herself belonged.
   The story is also a touching and deeply knowledgeable portrait in Lagerlöf's fairy-tale style. In the shape of a dark and splendid prince, dressed in a scarlet robe, Death comes on his horse to Årsta castle to abduct the aged Fredrika. Selma Lagerlöf well knew how during their childhood Fredrika and her sisters had dreamt of being "abducted" when they traveled by horse and wagon around the castle -abducted from the milieu that kept them imprisoned.
   In Lagerlöf's story, Death - the prince and liberator - brings Fredrika to heaven, where "He, the only one" is waiting. By him she is taken on a whirling flight "upwards, upwards." But "the next day there was deep sorrow all over the land of Sweden, sorrow in wide parts of the world."
   Selma Lagerlöf knew very well that she owed thanks to Fredrika Bremer, whose work had cleared the way for the free flight of fantasy, myth and fairy tale which were the insignia of Selma Lagerlöf as a writer. Fredrika Bremer was of course trapped in the "swaddling-clothes" of her time, in conventions, and taboos. But the person who reads her today with an understanding of the difficulties she had to overcome, has not only a lot to learn about her time, its way of living, and its society - he will also meet a brave, creative and free spirit.
   We have not yet caught up with her. Such conditions in our world or relations between people have not yet arisen which would allow her to rest in peace.
 

Translation: Ingrid Claréus
 

Publisher:
Swedish Institute     Date of publication: 1 Jan 1988 
 

Agneta Pleijel, (born in 1940) is a writer of poetry, prose and drama. She has been a literary critic and professor of drama and has published five novels, translated into many languages, in English The Dog Star (Hundstjärnan, 1989) and from her collection of poetry Eyes from a Dream (Ögon ur en dröm, 1984)
 

Works by Fredrika Bremer in English Translation

The Homes of the New World, 1853
Life in the Old World, 1860