Nelly Sachs (left) and Selma Lagerlöf (right).
Selma Lagerlöf was born in 1858 on a rural Swedish estate called Mårbacka. Her family belonged to an upper-middle class group of entrepreneurs who had lived in the region since at least the 1600s, when the prosperity of Värmland started to grow thanks to its mines of mineral ore. Her father, a gentleman farmer, had a reputation for gaiety and charisma, and his birthday parties each August grew into legitimate festivals for the whole district. Young Selma adored her father and wrote puppet shows and plays for these parties, which featured pageants, feasting, dancing, and performances.
As a girl, Lagerlöf distinguished herself from her siblings by staying inside with her books as they ran around the family farm at Mårbacka Manor in Värmland, a region in western Sweden. The estate at Mårbacka and its surrounding area became fertile soil for Selma’s imagination. Lagerlöf dreamt of becoming a poet, staying up late in her bed to think of rhymes for her verses. As she recounts in her autobiographically inspired short story collection, The Girl from Marsh Croft, “She went about at home on the quiet farm, filling every scrap of paper she could lay her hands on with verse and prose, with plays and romances.”
She put these dreams on hold to attend teachers’ college in Stockholm. One day, walking back from a lecture at her teacher’s college, she got the idea for the character of Gösta, later describing the event as one in which the ground seemed to rock. First, she tried writing the story as poetry, then as a drama, and finally as prose. The tales follow the protagonist Gösta as he evolves from a dismissed, drunken priest to an infamous pensioner in Värmland. Lagerlöf sent the manuscript to a contest; she had such low confidence in its quality, that she assumed the editors counted her submission among the couple they disqualified for being “unreadable.” A few months later, she received a telegram with congratulations, then saw the announcement in the Stockholm papers. She had won. In 1891, when Lagerlöf was thirty-three years old, Gösta Berlings Saga was published, and her public career as an author began.