The fact that he cheated a little girl by stealing her sack of flour will lead him little by little to despair, but our Lagerlof will give her character a strange gift of conversion and rehabilitation. In this work we find ourselves discovering the life of Gosta, a protestant pastor forced to leave his church caused of his habit to drink, thus ending up begging to survive. I was really impressed by the beauty and complexity of this book, I had already read years ago a Lagerlof's work 'Jerusalem', which left me positive surprised. Outside of Sweden she's perhaps most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige ( The Wonderful Adventures of Nils). She would among other things help the Jewish writer Nelly Sachs to come to Sweden and donated her Nobel medal to the Finnish war effort against the Soviet union. Lagerlöf was involved in both women issues as well as politics. Her visit to Palestine and a colony of Christians there, would inspire her to write Jerusalem, her story of Swedish farmers converting into a evangelical Christian group and travelling to 'The American Colony' in Jerusalem. For many years her constant companion was fellow writer Sophie Elkan, with whom she traveled to Italy and the Middle East. Lagerlöf never married and was almost certainly a lesbian (she never officially stated that she was, but most later researchers believe this to be the case).

As her writer career progressed she would keep up a correspondance with some of her former female collegues for almost her entire life. Since she for some of her early years had problems with her legs (she was born with a faulty hip) she would also spend a lot of time reading books such as the Bible.Īs a young woman she was a teacher in the southern parts of Sweden for ten years before her first novel Gösta Berling's Saga was published. She later also became the first female member of the Swedish Academy.īorn in the forested countryside of Sweden she was told many of the classic Swedish fairytales, which she would later use as inspiration in her magic realist writings. In 1909 she became the first woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, 'in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings'. Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was a Swedish author.

Gösta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf