Novel
Hertha
Fredrika Bremer · 1856
Synopsis
Hertha Falk, a outspoken young woman, lives in a house dominated by a tyrannical father. The law of her country keeps her a minor until she marries: her father controls her property, her studies and her future. She would like to learn, to make herself useful, to nurse, and dreams of a freedom that she also claims for her “chained sisters”; she compares the enslavement of the women of Sweden to the slavery of America. Against this father, a struggle begins that will last.
Context
The novel owes much to what the author had observed of the condition of women during her American stay. It appeared in September 1856, with an appendix in which she reviewed the debate on the legal majority of women and lamented that it had changed nothing. It set off a lively press quarrel while she was travelling; the educator Herman Bjursten judged improper the scene in which the heroine tends a wounded young man. In 1858, Parliament allowed unmarried women of twenty-five to have themselves declared of age by a court; the book's share in that vote remains debated. As early as 1856 it had been translated into French and English; Åsa Arping and Gunnel Furuland produced the critical edition in 2020.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and fifty pages; it is worth knowing that in Sweden, before 1858, an unmarried woman remained a minor for the whole of her life.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first feminist novel in Swedish literature, it set off a national debate.
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