In 1909 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Lagerlöf wrote prolifically, with her children’s book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils becoming especially popular, and also became an outspoken member of the women’s suffrage movement in Sweden. Lagerlöf went on to travel to Jerusalem (which inspired her book Jerusalem) and then several other countries, eventually giving up teaching and focusing on writing. In 1894 she met the writer Sophie Elkan, who became her close friend and possible lover.
In 1891 she published her first (and most popular) work, Gösta Berling’s Saga. In 1882 she attended a teachers’ college in Stockholm, and in 1885 became a teacher at a girls’ secondary school, where she liked to tell stories and parables to her students. Her parents were upper-class and her father was an alcoholic army lieutenant. This first novel from the deeply original mind of the 1909 Nobel Prize winner weaves a balance between everyday rural reality and underlying dreams and fable to create a patchwork of extraordinary complexity and looming fascination, in which the reader can detect the author’s passion for the stories of her country, and her sceptical warmth for the troubled human spirit.Selma Lagerlöf was born in Värmland in western Sweden, and was the fifth child out of six. Gösta’s great loves, his enemies, those to whom he teaches lessons about life, either intentionally or accidentally, and others whose stories he has only a small part in, all start up from the page into a strange, elemental clarity, creating a sprawling mosaic of romance and realism.
In her telling of what happens next, Lagerlöf creates a strange fusion between the realism of authors like Ibsen and Strindberg and the mythic force of the Scandinavian sagas. This group call themselves the cavaliers. He teams together with a group of sometimes dissolute, often well-meaning freemen of their district to evict the seemingly mad owner of a great rambling house at the centre of its own semi-feudal estate, Ekeby. Gösta Berling is a failed parson in nineteenth century rural Sweden, too fond of pleasure and the drink, torn by conflicting aims - the charm and deceit, love and laziness in him fighting for supremacy. Translated by Lillie Tudeer and Velma Swanston Howard
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