Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born in 1858 at Mårbacka, the family estate in Värmland, the fifth of six children of an army lieutenant. A hip condition left her lame for a time in early childhood, and she was taught at home, nourished by her grandmother’s stories and an early passion for reading. The sale of Mårbacka in 1884 marked her deeply. She trained as a teacher in Stockholm and from 1885 taught at a girls’ school in Landskrona.

There she began Gösta Berling’s Saga (1891), a rhapsodic novel of a defrocked priest among the carousing cavaliers of a Värmland manor. Chapters entered in a magazine competition won her a contract, and Georg Brandes’s praise of the Danish translation secured her reputation. Turning from the realism of Strindberg’s generation, she wrote in a voice close to oral storytelling. Travels with her companion Sophie Elkan inspired Jerusalem (1901–02), about Dalarna farmers who emigrate to the Holy Land. Asked to write a geography reader for schoolchildren, she produced The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906–07), in which a boy shrunk to the size of a thumb crosses Sweden on a goose’s back. The Phantom Carriage (1912) and the Löwensköld trilogy followed.

In 1909 she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1914 the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy. She used the prize to buy back Mårbacka, where she lived for the rest of her life. A prominent voice for women’s suffrage, she also helped, shortly before her death, to secure refuge in Sweden for the poet Nelly Sachs and her mother. She died at Mårbacka in March 1940. Filmed by Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, her books helped shape the golden age of Swedish silent cinema.