Selma Lagerlöf
1858–1940
Biography
Selma Lagerlöf came into the world at Mårbacka, the family estate in Värmland, a forested province in the west of Sweden, on 20 November 1858. Her father was a lieutenant in the Värmland regiment. Compulsory schooling was not yet fully in place, so she was taught at home, and she read widely there; her grandmother told her fairy tales. At seven, after reading an adventure story, she resolved to be a writer. She trained as a teacher in Stockholm from 1882 to 1885 and taught at a girls' school in Landskrona until 1895, when she gave up teaching to write full time. The family sold Mårbacka in 1884, and she later bought it back with the money from her Nobel Prize and spent the remainder of her years there. She died on 16 March 1940.
Her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, appeared in 1891, when she was 33. She began it while teaching in Landskrona: she entered its opening chapters in a literary contest run by the magazine Idun and was offered a contract to publish the entire novel. Its reputation grew after the influential critic Georg Brandes praised a Danish translation. Most of her fiction is set in Värmland, and her writing reacted against the hard realism of contemporaries such as August Strindberg. Her later books took her further afield. A visit to the American Colony in Jerusalem in 1900 inspired the novel Jerusalem, published in two parts in 1901 and 1902, and travels with her close friend Sophie Elkan took her to Italy, Palestine and Egypt. In 1909 she became the first female laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoured for her idealism, imagination and spiritual insight. In 1914 she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy, and in 1991 she was the first woman shown on a Swedish banknote.
Two of her books are on this site. Nils Holgersson, here in the German edition Wunderbare Reise des kleinen Nils Holgersson mit den Wildgänsen, was commissioned in 1902 by a national teachers' association that wanted a geography book for children. A boy shrunk to the size of a thumb rides across Sweden on the back of a goose, and the story carries the history and geography of the country's provinces along the way. It appeared in 1906 and 1907 and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Bannlyst, a novel from 1918 that is called The Outcast in English, is also here, and some copies credit Pauline Klaiber as translator. Together they show how folk tale, national history and the Värmland landscape came together in her fiction.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Bannlyst
by Selma Lagerlöf
Sven Elversson comes home from a polar expedition to the island of Grimön on the west coast of Sweden, followed by a rumour of what the starving men did to stay alive, and the island turns its back on him. Selma Lagerlöf's novel of 1918 follows the outcast as he tries to live a…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Wunderbare Reise des kleinen Nils Holgersson mit den Wildgänsen: Ein Kinderbuch
by Selma Lagerlöf (translated by Pauline Klaiber)
Nils, a lazy and unkind farm boy in southern Sweden, is shrunk to the size of a thumb by a household elf. He rides off on the back of a tame goose that joins a flock of wild geese flying north, and on the long journey across Sweden he comes to know its landscapes, legends and…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.