Tag: Swedish

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Fredrika Bremer: Sweden’s Charlotte Brontë

Cover image of The Colonel’s Family. Credit: an adaptation of an image in E. Neil’s 1891 book The Everyday Cook and Recipe Book published by J. S. Ogilvie, New York.

Our recent reissue of Fredrika Bremer’s The Colonel’s Family, translated by Sarah Death, is guaranteed to provide cheer – we are delighted to have brought it back into print, and with a glorious new cover, no less.

Often referred to as Sweden’s Charlotte Brontë, Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) was widely translated during her lifetime and became internationally acclaimed as the author of an impressive series of novels and travel books. The Colonel’s Family first appeared in two parts in 1830–31 as part of a series which she called Sketches from Daily Life – a title which boldly signals her intention to step into the world of published storytelling and weave engaging, thought-provoking fiction on the domestic details of women’s lives. 

What was less immediately apparent to her contemporaries was her courage in abandoning the prevailing conventions of insipid romantic fiction in order to explore more profound social and moral problems. Her novel is now recognised as a sensitive exploration of the problems of a frustrated, silenced woman, a creature of strong repressed passions, in an era of highly constrictive marital conventions. The striking narrative style is a combination of the picaresque, the sentimental, the realistic, the comic and even the farcical. This translation of a classic of Swedish literature preserves the freshness and idiosyncratic flavour of the original.

Below, we provide a sample from the novel in the tragic-comic vein: eager son of the family, Cornet Carl, who holds a rank in military music, has for some time been ardently in love with Hermina, the only child of mysterious, unsociable parents who live in a house in the forest. Discovering to his dismay that the family appears to have done a moonlight flit, he sets out on a quest to find his beloved and starts by interrogating the neighbours. In the process he finds himself ensnared …

All at once there came from the next-door room a terrible noise, a shriek, a laugh, a din, an unparalleled jubilation. There was a scraping of fiddles, a clattering of fire-irons, there was singing and whining and squeaking. And amid all this din, the only sound to emerge with any clarity among diverse other cries was:

‘Papa, Papa! Now we know which play! Now we can get ready for the spectacle! Hurrah, hurrah!

The cheering crowd came pouring into the room like a roaring torrent, but when the young people saw Cornet Carl, their joy knew no bounds. Up went a general cry of ‘Iphigenia, Iphigenia! Hurrah! Hurrah! Long live Iphigenia the Second, long live Cornet Iphigenia! Long live…’

‘Death and damnation!’ thought the Cornet, as the wild crowd fell on him and tried to drag him off, shouting, ‘Come on Iphigenia! Come on Cornet Carl, quickly, quickly! We are just going to have a rehearsal. The Cornet can read his part … come on, do come on!’

‘Hocus pocus over Cornet Carl! Kneel down and arise as Iphigenia.’

The last was trumpeted by sweet little Agnes D***, who was standing on tiptoe trying to place a veil on Cornet Carl’s head, but could reach no higher than his ears. Lieutenant Ruttelin came to her aid. Eleonora D*** and Mina P*** had already draped a large shawl around his shoulders, and three young gentlemen wound a sheet around him to look like a skirt. Lieutenant Arvid was also in evidence among the aides of the Misses D***.

The Cornet resisted; to no avail; he raised his voice, even shouted – to no avail – in all the noise, he could not make himself heard, let alone understood. Utter desperation born of pure vexation overwhelmed him, and led him to a desperate decision. Using his strength in a manner that was hardly polite, he elbowed the crowd aside to right and left, tore off the sheet and – ran. Ran through an open door which he spied in front of him, found himself in a long series of rooms, looked neither right nor left, just ran, ran, ran! He knocked over a maidservant, three chairs and two tables, and ran on from room to room, until he emerged in a large dining-room. Beyond it lay the entrance hall. The Cornet knew this – and is about to set off in that direction when to his dismay he hears the cheering troop coming towards him from the hall, blocking his path and uttering loud and reproachful cries of ‘Iphigenia, Iphigenia!’ Deeply agitated and on the verge of turning back to repeat his grand tour, the Cornet catches sight of a half-open door, leading to a little spiral staircase.

He went down it like an arrow. It was dark and cramped – kept on going round and round. The Cornet’s hand was going round and round too, by the time his feet touched firm ground. He was standing in a dark little passageway. A shaft of light came from an iron door standing ajar. The Cornet went through this door too. Through a window opposite, protected by heavy iron bars, the dull light of a setting autumn sun fell on the whitish-grey stone walls of the tiny room. The Cornet found himself – in a prison cell? – No, in a larder.

The Cornet searched for a way out. There was indeed a door in the little passageway, facing the door to the vault, but it needed a key to open it, and there was no key. The Cornet searched and searched – in vain. He sat down on a bread bin in the vault, freed himself from shawl and veil, and was comforted to hear the sound of the wild hunters going by up above and moving further off in their efforts to track him down. Yet they still sounded close enough to prevent the Cornet going back upstairs. Miserable, indignant, tired, feeling bitter towards the whole world, he stared vacantly ahead. A plate of pastries, the remains of a pie, of some roast veal and blackcurrant fool, standing in the sunlight on the table, met his eyes in a friendly and beckoning manner.

The Cornet felt a strange sensation; in the midst of his despair, tormented by a thousand agonizing thoughts, he felt – hungry!

Poor human nature! O humanity, pinnacle of creation! Dust-king of the dust! Is it Heaven or Hell which dominates your breast? – Yet you must eat! One minute an angel, the next an animal! Poor human nature!

And conversely: Fortunate human nature! Fortunate dichotomy, which alone maintains the unity of the being. The animal comforts the spirit, the spirit the animal, and only thus can the human being exist.

The Cornet existed – was hungry – saw food, and wasted little time in satisfying his hunger with it. The pie had to surrender its forcemeat and poultry filling to that purpose.

Forgive me! Forgive me, my young lady readers! I know … a lover, and a hero of a novel in particular, should not be so prosaic, so earthy … and our hero may be in danger of losing all your gracious sympathy. But consider, consider, you sweet creatures who live on feelings and the scent of roses, he was a man, and worse – a Cornet; he had had a long ride and eaten not a bite all day. Consider it!

If you would like to read more, you can order The Colonel’s Family from your favourite local bookshop. To learn more about Fredrika Bremer’s delicious writing, see our previous blog: https://norvikpress.com/2022/08/06/its-women-in-translation-month-witmonth/ (which includes a link to an essay on Bremer’s fictional way with food: Shaky Puddings: Fredrika Bremer’s fictional way with food and drink by Sarah Death).

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A child’s Christmas in Sweden

Glögg, or mulled wine, is a warm beverage best enjoyed during the cold weeks leading up to Christmas. It tastes even better if you drink it with gingerbread snaps. Credit: Emelie Asplund/imagebank.sweden.se

‘I can well understand that Maria was obliged to send you packing Alfred, today of all days,’ says Mama. ‘A madcap like you is the last person one wants around when Christmas preparations are in full swing.’ 

It’s approaching that time of year again: of ginger snaps and glögg by the fire, and some cosy Christmassy reading! The above quote is a little snippet of our gift to you: an exclusive seasonal extract from the newest addition to our Lagerlöf in English series, Memoirs of a Child.

Memoirs of a Child continues the story of Selma Lagerlöf’s childhood that was begun in Mårbacka, and its scenes of Värmland county and preparations for winter festivities are the perfect accompaniment this winter. Open up our extract below:

Memoirs of a Child – extract from Pastor Unger

If you would like to immerse yourself in the full experience, you can order Memoirs of a Child here, or from your favourite local bookshop.

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Memoirs of a Child – coming soon!

Cover of Memoirs of a Child, the newest addition to the Lagerlöf in English series

We are delighted to announce a forthcoming addition to our Lagerlöf in English series: Memoirs of a Child.

Memoirs of a Child is the second part of a (notionally!) autobiographical trilogy by Selma Lagerlöf. Continuing on from the personal creation myth begun in Mårbacka, Lagerlöf here broadens the perspective from the farm where she grew up to include the people and places around Lake Fryken in her beloved Värmland county and a focus on the self-discipline and imagination needed to fulfil a childhood ambition to become an author. Pursuing this ambition is hard work that sometimes means taking a stand against convention. It is also a deeply enriching process in a home steeped in storytelling and books. The mature author reveals the roots of the young bibliophile’s growing skill in deploying fiction to manipulate and embellish reality, producing a wryly charming, tongue-in-cheek account – one that we should beware of taking at face value…!

We hope to publish this sequel by the end of November 2022, in good time for Lagerlöf fans to curl up with it by a cosy fire, or to gift it for Christmas.

If you would like to remind yourself of Mårbacka beforehand, you can listen to a reading of it linked from this Tweet (very in keeping with the storytelling theme); and you can order your copy of it here, or from your favourite bookshop.

And because we always like to treat our readers: here is an exclusive extract from Memoirs of a Child, pre-publication:

Memoirs of a Child – Extract

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It’s Women in Translation month! #WITMonth

It’s our favourite time of year again: August, and Women in Translation month! #WITMonth

To celebrate, we are enjoying reading our friends over at Swedish Book Review…

…and we are making available online a truly scrumptious essay from the Swedish Book Review archives: Shaky Puddings: Fredrika Bremer’s fictional way with food and drink by Sarah Death. This essay is an abridged version of a conference paper originally delivered in Swedish, and appeared in print in the Swedish Book Review Food and Drink Supplement, 2003 (pp. 13-17). We love all sorts of puddings here at Norvik, particularly nice cool shaky ones – blancmange, jellies, panna cotta, I could go on!

Further gems from the Swedish Book Review archives are available here.

Now, where’s our hammock?!

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Two of our Swedish translations shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2021

Covers of Chitambo and Crisis, the two shortlisted translations

Norvik Press are delighted to announce that two of our translators have been shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2021:

  • Sarah Death for her translation of Chitambo by Hagar Olsson
  • Amanda Doxtater for her translation of Crisis by Karin Boye

We are immensely proud of this achievement and its potential to introduce new readers to both of these classics in Nordic modernism and feminism.

The Bernard Shaw Prize is an award for translations into English of full-length Swedish language works of literary merit and general interest. This year’s judges are Charlotte Berry and Annika Lindskog. The award is sponsored by the Embassy of Sweden, London.

The award ceremony will be held in February 2022. If you are planning on reading the shortlist in the meantime, you can read the full press release here and order copies of Chitambo and Crisis through our website or your local indie bookshop. You can also read extracts from both by revisiting our blogposts: start here for Chitambo, and here for Crisis.

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A sisterhood of necessity

Members of the Lotta Svärd organization, Finland’s equivalent of the Swedish lottor, prepare food for Finnish volunteers on a clearance camp shortly before the Continuation War (1941). Credit: Uusi Suomi.

As part of our celebration of Women in Translation Month, Sarah Death introduces an extract from The Angel House, the third part of Norvik’s recently republished Katrineholm series. 

Kerstin Ekman’s central project in this quartet of novels was to depict the lives of women in a world run by men, the ‘town within the town’. The four books have become known collectively as Kvinnorna och staden, generally translated as ‘Women and the City’, and are a portrait of the town of Katrineholm in periods both before and after it gained its official city status in 1917.  It is barely more than a collection of fields and hamlets as the first novel opens and as the series unfolds we see it develop into a bustling town and thriving railway hub.

Women are not only the beating heart of Kerstin Ekman’s quartet, they are also the community’s backbone, a vital component of its workforce. We often see them labouring away on their own, as in our extract about Ingeborg Ek (see Linda Schenck’s recent post: ‘Round and round we go’). That dust keeps collecting on the furniture, those berries keep ripening and are crying out to be preserved for the winter, those nappies need an urgent wash. Individual women even labour in the night, be it nursing a new baby, setting dough and baking bread, making sweets to sell at your market stall, or hemming a frock to meet a dressmaking deadline.   Sometimes they are worn out, numb, at the end of their tether, sometimes desperately lonely, and sometimes they are relieved to be left in peace.

But there are also many scenes in the books of women working together, living in what we might call a sisterhood of necessity. This can be at an everyday level, sharing the privies and backyards, looking after the children, watering the communal gardens, feeding the cats, keeping an eye on each other’s washing and slipping through the hedge or across the stairwell to borrow a cup of sugar.  It can be at the level of individual friendships, many of which we see flourishing, like the one between Ingrid and Maud who enjoy their nights out dancing even though there is a war on. It can be in small clusters, like the group of elderly ladies, Tora, Ebba and a few other good friends who come together for a weekly whist evening and a comforting chat over beer, coffee and sandwiches as they try to come to terms with old age.

And it can be on a larger scale, the most notable example being the lottor, the Women’s Defence Volunteers, roped in from diverse walks of life to perform the heroic feat of feeding and watering the troops whose trains pull up at the station platform at any time of day or night. Dog-tired, possibly after a day’s work in their regular jobs, they drag themselves through their shifts and – rather to their own surprise – forge a precarious kind of solidarity that becomes increasingly precious to them, a bulwark against war, loneliness and all the other trials of life.

Click on the book cover below to read the extract.

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Round and round we go…

Delicious drottningsylt. Credit: Ove Lindfors.

As part of our celebration of Women in Translation Month, Linda Schenck introduces an extract from The Spring, the second part of Norvik’s recently republished Katrineholm series. 

The years have their cycles, and we our rituals. Never have they become more distinct than during the course of the ongoing 2020–21 pandemic. Kerstin Ekman’s writing also has its cycles, and with Norvik Press having republished the Women and the City tetralogy they, too, have become increasingly distinct. The echoes of previous books in the later ones, the return of places, names and rituals. So I find myself writing this little introduction to a section smack in the middle of The Spring, book two of Women and the City, at the same time as I am reading and rereading her forthcoming novel, Löpa varg (roughly ‘Wolf Run’), set for publication in September 2021. I hope this brief text may serve both as a look back, and a bit of a forward teaser, no spoilers.

The extract below features Ingeborg Ek, foster mother to Ingrid. Ingrid comes from a household where there is just barely enough money to pay the rent and put porridge on the table (often for breakfast and dinner), so we partly imagine her moving into the home of ‘one of the most industrious, most thorough people on earth’ who ‘never made a hollandaise sauce with fewer than ten yolks’ and whose life is regimented by seasons, rituals and their demands (with no mention of their pleasures), and partly see her through the narrator’s eyes. Ingeborg ‘regularly wore herself out at Christmas time’, baked the seasonal cakes for every holiday, spent the summer making jams and jellies, and before she knew it the next Christmas was over, leaving ‘candle wax on the runners, pine needles on the carpet, cigar ash on the sofa and rings on the tabletop from glasses’.

In Ekman’s 2021 novel, the female protagonist, Inga, lives in rural Hälsingland and makes an orange marmalade that takes three days, prompting her husband to comment: ‘You can only find the kind of time you need to make marmalade like that up here.’ But she does her chores out of love, and even recruits her husband, a thought that would never have occurred to Ingeborg Ek. He tells the reader: ‘In the spring light everything was suddenly visible: greasy fingerprints on cupboard doors, limescale stains in the bathroom, cobwebs by the ceiling cornices. Inga swished through the whole house at a mad pace but quite cheerfully, armed with cleaning agents, mops, rags and scrubby sponges. She assigned me to deal with the bookcases.’

Hence, what goes around comes around, in the calendar, in Ekman’s texts, and in our lives. I’m heading out into the woods now. If there are ripe blueberries, I will be able to make raspberry and blueberry jam tonight, the kind the Swedes call the queen of jams, drottningsylt.

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Women’s cyclical work in men’s linear world

As Norvik Press publishes its new collector’s editions of Kerstin Ekman’s ‘Women and the City’ quartet, Sarah Death considers the clashing versions of time that structure the third book in the series, The Angel House.

In one chapter of The Angel House, the author describes how the lottor, the women’s defence service volunteers, are called on to cook and serve up vast amounts of food at the railway station for soldiers in transit overnight. One of them, Hilda, reveals when chatting to an apparently friendly officer on the platform that she has worked out the times and destinations of the trains, despite precautions designed to maintain secrecy. The man turns out to be a security officer and Hilda receives a severe reprimand and is demoted to kitchen duties so she poses no further risk.

Later we find a scene in which another lotta, Jenny, one of the novel’s central characters, is also affected by the timetables of war. Wartime production of anti-aircraft guns means her husband Fredrik is constantly obliged to work overtime, but Jenny hates the war, even if it brings employment in neutral Sweden. Tired after her long night shifts at the railway station, she drags herself out of bed before six, makes Fredrik his breakfast and waves him off, but inside she feels an incoherent anger: ‘Suddenly she wanted to shout after him, open the window and shout so that everyone could hear. Good God – it’s Sunday! That’s something special, a holiday when people wear better clothes, eat different food. They can’t do this to time!’

These two episodes also have a deeper significance. They are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern which underpins the whole novel, and indeed the whole ‘Women and the City’ series about the people and the industrialisation of a Swedish provincial town. This quartet, written between 1974 and 1983, stands out from other epics of social realism in twentieth-century Swedish literature for its sustained identification with the women’s perspective. With industrialisation seen here as essentially the men’s preserve, there is a conflict throughout between the female and male strands of the narrative. In the two episodes described above, Kerstin Ekman is showing women co-opted by, and falling foul of, Men’s Time, and conflicts of this sort erupt repeatedly.

For men, time in the world depicted by Ekman appears largely as a linear project of departure, progression and arrival, whereas women’s time is more organic and cyclical. The latter’s strands of the narrative are more likely to be expressed in seasonal or gestational time, or in the loose rhythms of domestic tasks, than in rigid clock time. Time is elastic for the women in this novel, ranging from long periods of enforced waiting to interludes of frenzied activity. Male time in The Angel House, on the other hand, is ‘tempo’, a hectic, artificial, externally imposed time which attempts to structure life and order society. It is the time of factory hooters, referees’ whistles and military exercises. Above all it is train-timetable time, the railway representing the march of progress and the triumph of technocratic solutions.

The narrative deliberately alternates between male and female episodes. Thus, for example, a chapter highlighting young Ingrid’s feelings about pregnancy and impending motherhood is followed by a history of the Carlsborg, a building in which the – male – town councillors manoeuvre for ever greater influence in smoke-filled rooms. And on Jenny and Fredrik’s summer cycling holiday, Jenny’s enjoyment of the open air and sense of identification with Stone Age female pot makers are followed by a day spent, at Fredrik’s request, touring the Bofors armaments factory.

Ekman’s individual male characters are far from caricatures, they are three-dimensional human beings, with all their failings and strengths. But when she depicts male collectives and men’s time, the tone is nearly always ironic, even comic. The tone when she writes about women and the passing of their time is quite different. She does not hesitate to reveal their weaknesses, but she charts their lives and labour (in all senses of the word) with tenderness and empathy. As Ekman writes of them elsewhere, ‘You want to fly to heaven in the company of spiritual gentlemen. But yours is a fate that is pure biology. And yours is a bloody awful story.’

Much of The Angel House is set during the Second World War and, as we have seen, wartime exigencies polarise male and female timetables still further. But running through the whole novel, in peacetime and in wartime, a vivid reminder of the two different approaches to time is provided by the contrasting pair gator/gårdar(streets/gardens) and the very different pace of life in those worlds, one public and one private, as the year passes. In one of them, there are tax officials, town councillors, property deeds changing hands and budgets recommended for child allowances and pensions. In the other, tucked away in the backyards, there are rows of privies, knotty old trees and raspberry thickets, rain on the spring vegetables, a swing, and holes in the hedges for cats and children and people who need to borrow a cup of milk.

This is a newly revised and shortened version of an essay first published in A Century of Swedish Narrative, eds. Sarah Death and Helena Forsås-Scott (Norvik Press, 1994).

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Reading and re-reading Kerstin Ekman on a century of women’s lives

To mark the publication of our new editions of the Women and the City series, translator Linda Schenck offers her enthusiastic and personal perspective on the power of Ekman’s writing.

Witches’ Rings, The Spring, The Angel House and City of Light – my heart still quickens at the sight of this tetralogy by Kerstin Ekman on my bookshelf. What is it about them?

I was in my late twenties and early thirties when I read these books as they were being published (between 1974 and 1983, translations between 1997 and 2003), waiting with bated breath for the next volume. Very early on, I also knew that I aspired to translate them (I was just beginning to find my feet as a translator, a profession I have come to love and appreciate not least for the closeness it gives me to texts). Initially, I had a contract with a small press in the US to translate Witches’ Rings. This was in the years before computers were the tool of the trade. I typed my manuscript in duplicate, using carbon paper. At some point in the mid-1980s after I submitted my translation to the press and before there were proofs, the press went bottom up, taking my hopes of translation with it. For many years the carbon copy remained in my desk drawer, until Norvik Press agreed to publish first Witches’ Rings, and eventually the entire tetralogy. Sarah Death kindly agreed to translate The Angel House so the project could be expedited rather than dragged out over two or three additional years. And so by 2003 the entire tetralogy was finally available to English-language readers, two decades after its publication in Swedish.

A full adult lifetime (and translation career) later, this tetralogy still stands out to me as the greatest writing by a contemporary author it has been my privilege to make available in English. When people ask me what I would choose to translate, given a free hand, I answer without hesitation: the two volumes of Ekman’s later trilogy, known as the Wolfskin Trilogy: Sista rompan (The Last String) and Skraplotter (Scratchcards), which have not yet found a home in the world of English publications. (The first volume of the trilogy, God’s Mercy, is available in the European Women in Translation series published by the University of Nebraska Press: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803224582/. The series was published in Swedish between 1999 and 2003.)

What makes these Women and the City books so unputdownable? What makes Ekman such an outstanding novelist? What makes these four books so universal, in spite of their extreme specificity of place? I had planned to leaf through them (for the first time in twenty years) in order to write this blogpost. I found myself unable to leaf, caught up once again in the narrative. Ekman has, quite simply, that amazing gift that only the greatest writers possess: an ability to combine structure, character depiction, theme and depth into stories that bite and burn, but also with wonderful humorous twists.

The four novels span an entire century, beginning in the early 1870s, a hundred-year period marked by the arrival of the railroad at one end and the chaotic advent of the global village at the other, all from the point of view of women and their work. As a reader, my heart goes out to each woman. Let me simply introduce some of them with a few words, and a quotation from the books. The first is Sara Sabina Lans, “gray as a rat, poor as a louse, pouchy and lean as a vixen in summer” and Witches’ Rings mainly follows her reasonably long life, then the very short life of her daughter Edla – “The innkeeper took Edla into service, not officially as a proper housemaid, of course, since she was only thirteen and a half years old…” – and then focuses on Edla’s daughter Tora: “Tora Lans was fifteen years old when she went to Meadowlands. She was strong and built for work, as her grandmother had said”. Edla died giving birth to Tora before she was fourteen. Tora was raised by her grandmother, Sara Sabina Lans. When The Spring opens, Tora is a widow at twenty-seven, with two toddlers and an earlier son given up for adoption. By the middle of The Spring (which encompasses World War I) she is in her mid-fifties, still laboring to make ends meet, and by the end of The Angel House she is dying and World War II has come and gone (“It seemed…that the illness and death casting a shadow over her short, windswept autumnal days made her doubly eager to teach them the art of survival”). She and her neighbor and close friend Frida, thirteen years Tora’s senior, have moved up in the world, to the extent that Tora now owns one of the local tea rooms and Frida has employment at the local laundry rather than going to people’s homes to do their washing. (“Frida was born in 1863. That was the year the number of out-of-wedlock children in the parish doubled, the year after the western branch of the railway was completed… That was nearly sixty years back. Occasionally she was tempted to say to Tora, ‘Your mother and I were classmates. We were the same age and would have done our catechism together’. But Tora’s mother didn’t live to be confirmed”). Their children are adults now, with the exception of Ingrid, Frida’s “accident” from the period of the great strike of 1909, whose life has mainly been spent fostered out into care, but for whom Tora has always played a decisive role. Ingrid gradually becomes a main figure of The Angel House, a working woman with a child of her own. (“What are these attacks of exhaustion and crying and abandonment and hysteria? Will I ever understand? This feeling that life’s got too hard and the demands have multiplied and there’s work, nothing but work, poking its grey snout up wherever I look…”). Towards the end we are introduced to Ann-Marie (“She wasn’t Fredrik and Jenny’s little girl, but the daughter of an inventor Fredrik had got to know… Ann-Marie had no mother”).

When City of Light opens, Ann-Marie is a middle-aged woman who has returned from Portugal, where she lives, to sell her alcoholic father’s house after his death. She hopes to make quick work of the whole affair, but her return to Sweden coupled with the disappearance of her teenage daughter provokes a deep depression and a soul-searching journey. So, from the 1870s, when Sara Sabina Lans’ lot was a life of mainly physical labor, the reader has moved forward a century, to the 1970s and a mainly psychological focus. In City of Light the exploration uses myth, religion and philosophy, all hallmarks of the late twentieth century, to continue posing the core question of the tetralogy: what is the life of a woman? (As the narrator tells us: “We all drag a cloud of causes behind us”).

Maria Schottenius, a Swedish writer and Ekman scholar, concludes her foreword to the 2003 translation of City of Light with a short paragraph that to me perfectly sums up the entire experience of reading the Women and the City tetralogy: “This is no innocent work of literature. It has a powerful story to tell. And a unique way of telling it”.

I deeply hope that twenty-first century readers will be tempted to delve into these stories. In my view they offer an incomparable overview of both personal and community life from the 1860s through to nearly the end of the twentieth century. Sadly, as I write this, in 2021, a year into the pandemic with no end in sight and vaccines being hoarded by the wealthy western world with no concern for the rest of the world, Ekman’s indication of where the world was heading seems nothing less than prophetic.

A concluding anecdote: the cover of the first edition of Witches’ Rings was quite upsetting to me, as it so poorly reflected the content of novel, which highlights the wonders of the railroad and much of the modernization that came to budding urban areas in its wake. It was a photo of an extremely dilapidated railroad station. The book received an excellent fine review in Kirkus Reviews (November 15, 1997): “…a fine novel that honors, as it emulates, the tradition of village fiction created by such earlier Scandinavian masters as Selma Lagerlöf and Knut Hamsun. It’s wonderful stuff.”  And so I finally broached the subject of the cover with Kerstin Ekman herself. Her reply reflected her usual aplomb: “Indeed, the child we share seems to have gone out into the world in tatters, but in fact she is doing fine out there.” My relief was enormous. And I find the new 2021 cover both extremely attractive and eminently suitable!

Linda Schenck, May 2021