Fredrika Bremer

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with her grandmother, the Finnish businesswoman Ulrika Fredrika Bremer.

Fredrika Bremer
Sweden
(near Stockholm, Sweden)
OccupationWriter
Known forWriter, reformer
Notable workHertha

Fredrika Bremer (17 August 1801 – 31 December 1865) was a

women's magazine as well as the later magazine Hertha. In 1884, she became the namesake of the Fredrika Bremer Association, the first women's rights
organization in Sweden.

Early life

Fredrika Bremer was born into a

Swedish Finland but, upon his mother's death in 1798, Carl liquidated their holdings. (A few years later, the Finnish theater of the Napoleonic Wars would see Finland annexed to Russia.) When Fredrika was three years old, the family moved to Stockholm. The next year, they purchased Årsta Castle, about 20 miles (32 km) distant from the capital. Fredrika passed the next two decades of her life[6] summering there[5] and at another nearby estate owned by her father,[6] spending winter in the family's Stockholm apartment.[5]

Fredrika and her sisters were raised to marry and became socialites and hostesses within the upper class like their own French-trained mother. They were given the education then conventional for girls of their class in Sweden, with private tutors followed by a family trip through Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands in 1821 and 1822 before their social debuts.[6][7] She was a talented miniaturist and studied French, English, and German.[8] She later recounted that she kept a diary for a few years as a girl—"a kind of moral account-current, in which each day was entered, with a short observation of good, or bad, or middling"—but, as the yearly totals always showed the middling days' totals to be greatest, she tired of it and thereafter only kept them while traveling as notes for others.[9] Bremer found the limited and passive family life of Swedish women of her time suffocating and frustrating[10] and her own education was unusually strict,[6] with rigid timetables governing her days.[5] She described her family as "under the oppression of a male iron hand":[10][b] While in Stockholm, the girls were forbidden from playing outside and took their exercise by jumping up and down while holding onto the backs of chairs.[5] She wrote French poetry as early as the age of eight, but considered her time in Paris disappointing because of her father's bad temper.[10] She was considered awkward and rebellious throughout her childhood;[10] and one of her sisters later wrote of how she enjoyed cutting off parts of her dresses and curtains and throwing things into the fire to watch them burn.[8]

Early adulthood

Upon her return to Sweden, she debuted into upper-class society in Stockholm and

poems and began to long for some career through which she could do good in the world[6] beyond ladies' traditional employments. As she later wrote, "Embroidering an eternal and gray collar, I grew more and more numb... that is, in my living powers, my wish to live. The feeling of torment did not grow numb. It worsened day by day, like frost during a growing winter. The fire of my soul flickered anxiously with but one wish—to forever die out".[10][d] The "non-life" she saw awaiting her prompted an outbreak of depression.[8] Her resolve to find work at one of Stockholm's hospitals was undermined by a sister,[6] but she found great satisfaction in charity work around the family's estate in Årsta during the winters of 1826–7 and 1827–8.[10]

Her social work was the beginning of her literary career, as she began writing and seeking publishers in 1828

Lutheran sermon "On the Quiet Calling of Women" the year before but it was only published posthumously.)[8] Her 4-volume Sketches of Everyday Life was published as an anonymous serial from 1828 to 1831 and became an immediate success, particularly the comic Family H—[e] which appeared in the second and third volumes. She described the process as a revelation, as, once she had begun to write, she felt the words coming "as champagne bubbles out of a bottle".[10][f] The Swedish Academy awarded her their lesser gold medal on 1 January 1831; she continued to write for the remainder of her life.[6]

Her success and desire to keep writing drove her to study

God."[g] She hesitated, however, in accepting Böklin's proposal of marriage and, after he hastily married another woman in 1835, she retired from Stockholm's society life and never married. The two remained close correspondents for the rest of their lives. The President's Daughters (1834) is considered to represent Bremer's increased maturity, using a well-observed portrayal of childhood for its humor while soberly illustrating a reserved young woman's blossoming into a more open and friendly way of life. Nina, its 1835 sequel, attempted to wed her realistic style with more of the speculative philosophy she discussed with Böklin, an artistic failure that was harshly reviewed,[10] not least by Böklin and Bremer themselves.[13]

Writing career

For the next five years, Bremer settled as the guest of her friend Countess Stina Sommerheilm at Tomb Manor in

Goethe and Geijer—whom she met during a visit to Stockholm in 1837–8—informed several aspects of her next novel, The Home (1839).[10] Her male contemporaries' Gothicism prompted her 1840 play The Thrall, dealing with women's lot during the Viking Age.[14] After the countess's death, Bremer returned to Stockholm in 1840.[6]

Since her father's death in 1830, Fredrika had grown closer to her mother.

legal majority in 1840.[15] She spent the winter of 1841–42 alone in Årsta Castle, spending her time completing the tract Morning Watches (1842), in which she stated her personal religious belief as a matter of sense first and of mystic revelation second. This aroused some opposition but she was supported by Geijer, Tegnér, and Böklin. More importantly, the work was the first which she signed by her own full name, instantly making her a literary celebrity. In 1844, the Swedish Academy awarded her their greater gold medal.[10]

In 1842, Bremer ended the self-imposed isolation in which she had lived since Böklin's marriage and returned to Swedish social circles, which she portrayed in her Diary the next year.

dalers for anything except a warm overcoat and I will let it go."[17] Regarding her unselfishness, Geijer once remarked that, "my dear Fredrika, if you truly could push us all into heaven, you wouldn't mind staying outside yourself."[10][h]

She began traveling first around Sweden

overthrow of King Louis Philippe in France.[10]

Travel

Inspired by the work of

Spanish Cuba before returning to New York, leaving for Europe on 13 September 1851.[10] Throughout her journey, she wrote extensive letters to her sister Agathe[16] which were later edited into her 2-volume 1853 Homes in the New World.[10] Having previously portrayed the Swedish home as a world unto itself, she now portrayed the American world as a great home through the many families who hosted her as she roamed.[16] She spent six weeks in Britain,[10] visiting Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London and meeting Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot. Her series of articles about England for the Aftonbladet largely concerned her favorable impression of the Great Exhibition, which she visited four times.[22]
They were later gathered for English publication as England in 1851.

Activism

Following her return to Sweden in November, Bremer attempted to engage its middle- and upper-class ladies in social work similar to what she had found in America and England. She co-founded the Stockholm Women's Society for Children's Care (Skyddsmödraförening or Stockholms Fruntimmersförening för Barnavård) to assist the orphans left by the 1853 Stockholm cholera outbreak [24] and the Women's Society for the Improvement of Prisoners (Fruntimmersällskapet för Fångars Förbättring) to provide moral guidance and rehabilitation of female inmates in 1854.[25] On 28 August 1854, amid the Crimean War, the London Times published her "Invitation to a Peace Alliance" alongside an editorial rebuke of its contents: a pacifist appeal to Christian women.[22]

In 1856, she published her novel

Högre Lärarinneseminariet, a state school for the education of female teachers, was opened in 1861.[10]

Bremer was not present during the Hertha Discussion, since from 1856 to 1861 she participated in another great journey through Europe and the

Greece from August 1859 to May 1861. She reached Stockholm on 4 July 1861. Her accounts of the trip were published as Life in the Old World in six volumes from 1860 to 1862.[10]

Upon her return to Sweden, she expressed her satisfaction with the reforms Hertha had prompted and took an interest in

slavery in the United States.[10] She died at Årsta Castle outside of Stockholm on 31 December 1865.[10]

Legacy

Fredrika Bremer is the namesake of

state of Iowa, and its surrounding Bremer County. She is also the namesake of Fredrika Bremer Intermediate School in Minneapolis, Minnesota
.

The American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, includes a Fredrika Bremer Room dedicated to her accomplishments.

Literary

Statue depicting Fredrika Bremer in Stockholm, unveiled 2 June 1927
St. Croix river valley in the state of Minnesota
as "just the country for a new Scandinavia"

Fredrika Bremer's novels were usually romantic stories of the time, typically concerning an independent woman narrating her observations of others negotiating the marriage market. She argued for a new family life less focused on its male members and providing a larger place for women's talents and personalities.[27] Reflecting her own childhood, many of her works include a sharp urban/rural dichotomy; without exception, these present nature as a place of renewal, revelation, and self-discovery.[8]

By the time Bremer revealed her name to the public, her works were an acknowledged part of the cultural life in Sweden.[10] Translations made her still more popular abroad, where she was regarded as the "Swedish Miss Austen".[28] Upon her arrival in New York, the New York Herald claimed she "probably... has more readers than any other female writer on the globe" and proclaimed her the author "of a new style of literature".[29][30] A literary celebrity, Bremer was never without a place to stay during her two years in America despite having known no one before her arrival.[16] She was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman[31] and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women includes a scene of Mrs March reading from Bremer's works to her four daughters.

Her popularity abroad crested, however, in the 1840s and 1850s and faded by the turn of the century, although the late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing read Hertha in 1889.[32] Within Sweden, she continued to be highly respected, though little read.[33] The publication of her letters in the 1910s revived scholarly interest, but only in her personal life and travels. By 1948, the Swedish critic Algot Werin was writing that Bremer "really only lives as a name and a symbol... It does not matter if her novels are forgotten."[34] Bremer's novels were rediscovered by Swedish feminists in the latter half of the 20th century[33] and are undergoing critical reëvaluation.[5]

Social causes

Fredrika Bremer was interested in contemporary political life and social reform regarding gender equality and social work, and she was active both as an influential participator in the debate of women's rights as well as a philanthropist. Politically, she was a liberal, who felt sympathy for social issues and for the working class movement.[citation needed]

In 1853, she co-founded the Stockholms fruntimmersförening för barnavård (Stockholm women's fund for child care) with Fredrika Limnell.[35]

In 1854, she co-founded the Women's Society for the Improvement of Prisoners (

Tidskrift för hemmet inspired by the novel. This was the starting point for Adlersparre's work as the organizer of the Swedish feminist movement. The women's magazine Hertha
, named after the novel, was founded in 1914.

In 1860, she helped

Lovisa Årberg and the engraver Sofia Ahlbom
in her work.

Works

  • Sketches of Everyday Life (Swedish: Teckningar utur vardagslivet; 3 vols. 1828–31)
  • New Sketches of Everyday Life (Nya teckningar utur vardagslivet; 10 vols. 1834–58)
  • Thrall (Trälinnan; 1840)
  • Morning Watches (Morgon-väckter; 1842) Translated from the Swedish. Boston: Redding and Company. 1843. Fragile blue wrappers.
  • Life in Sweden. The President's Daughters Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 22 – Library of Select Novels
  • The Home or Family Cares and Family Joys Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 38 – Library of Select Novels
  • The H___ Family: Tralinnan; Axel and Anna;; and Other Tales Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 20 – Library of Select Novels
  • Life in Dalecarlia: The Parsonage of Mora Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 58 – Library of Select Novels
  • A Few Leaves from the Banks of the Rhine (Ett par blad ifrån Rhenstranden, eller Marienberg och Kaiserswerth 1846; 1848)
  • Brothers and Sisters: A Tale of Domestic Life Translated from the original unpublished manuscript by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 115 – Library of Select Novels
  • The Neighbors Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 20 – Library of Select Novels
  • Midsummer Journey: A Pilgrimage (Midsommarresan: en vallfart; 1848)
  • Life in the North (Lif i Norden; 1849)
  • An Easter Offering Translated from the original unpublished manuscript by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850 Fragile tan wrappers.
  • Homes in the New World (Hemmen i den nya världen : en dagbok i brev, skrivna under tvenne års resor i Norra Amerika och på Cuba; 2 vols. 1853–1854)
  • The Midnight Sun: A Pilgrimage Translated from the original unpublished manuscript by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855. Fragile tan wrappers. No. 124 – Library of Select Novels
  • "On the Novel as the Epic of Our Time" ("Om romanen såsom vår tids epos")
  • Life in the Old World (Livet i Gamla Världen : dagboks-anteckningar under resor i Söder- och Österland; 6 vols. 1860–1862)
  • A Little Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Liten pilgrims resa i det heliga landet : förra afdelningen : öfversigt af land och folk, Karmel, Nazareth, Cana, Genesareth, Tabor; 1865)
  • England in the Fall of 1851 (England om hösten år 1851; 1922)

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Only one brother, however, survived to adulthood.[5]
  2. ^ Swedish: "under förtrycket av en manlig järnhand".[10]
  3. ^ "Huru stilla, likt ett grumligt vatten, står tiden för en ungdom, som under ett tråkigt och overksamt liv framsläpar sina dagar."[11]
  4. ^ "Broderande på en evig och grå halsremsa, domnade jag allt mer och mer, det vill säga i mina livligare krafter, i min håg att leva. Känslan av plåga domnade ej, den blev med varje dag skarpare, liksom frosten under en tilltagande vinter. Lågan i min själ flämtade ångestfullt och ville blott ett—för alltid slockna."[10]
  5. ^ Also translated under the title The Colonel's Family.
  6. ^ "...som champagnebläddror ur en butelj."[10]
  7. ^ "Jag vill kyssa en man, amma ett barn, sköta ett hushåll, göra lyckliga och ej tänka utom för dem och för att prisa Gud."[10]
  8. ^ "Ja, min söta Fredrika, om du blott kunde skjuta oss alla in i himmelriket, skulle du gärna själv stanna utanför."[10]
  9. ^ As the German public grew more curious about the author, one edition of Nina included a unofficial "portrait" of Bremer so inaccurate she considered it to be a hoax (galenskap).[18]
  10. bootleg English translations were also made in London, New York, and Boston. These were almost invariably from Brockhaus's German editions—which Bremer mostly disliked[20]—and usually with still further abridgments, prompting still more complaints from the author.[21]
  1. ^ "Fredrika Bremer en kristen kämpe". Dagen (in Swedish). 24 April 2001. Retrieved 22 September 2021. Fredrika Bremer växte upp i en högborgerlig, välbeställd finlandssvensk familj
  2. ^ Lehto, Katri [in Finnish] (11 October 2000). "Fredrika Bremer". Biografiasampo (in Finnish). Retrieved 22 September 2021. Myös Fredrika Bremerin äiti Birgitta Charlotta Hollström oli suomalaista sukua. Kirjailija itsekin tiettävästi viittasi toisinaan "suomalaiseen sitkeyteensä ja itsepäisyyteensä"
  3. ^ Chisholm (1911), p. 494.
  4. ^ a b SBL (1906), p. 136.
  5. ^ a b c d e f Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 35.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Chisholm (1911), p. 495.
  7. ^ ASQ (1864), p. 54.
  8. ^ a b c d e f Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 36.
  9. ^ "To My Reader", Two Years in Switzerland and Italy, 1861, pp. v–vi
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al SBL (1926).
  11. ^ Diary entry for 1 March 1823, cited in the Swedish Biographical Dictionary.[10]
  12. ^ Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 38.
  13. ^ a b Forsås-Scott (1997), pp. 42–3.
  14. ^ Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 45.
  15. ^ Burman (2001), pp. 181–2.
  16. ^ a b c d e f g h i Pleijel, Agneta, "About Fredrika Bremer", Årstasällskapet för Fredrika Bremer-studier, retrieved 22 January 2016
  17. ^ "Visst är, det aldrig något, som har penningvärde, kommer att trivas länge hos mig—icke ens en medalj av Svenska akademien. Bjud mig 50 rdr för vad som helst, utom för ett varmt överplagg, och jag släpper det strax."[10]
  18. ^ "Preface", The H— Family, 1844, p. v
  19. ^ "Prefatory Notice", President's Daughters: A Narrative of a Governess, James Monroe & Co., 1843
  20. ^ "Preface by the Translator", A Diary, 1844, p. vii
  21. ^ "Preface by the Translator", A Diary, 1844, p. ix
  22. ^ a b c Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 48.
  23. ^ Anderson, Carl L. (June 1965), "Fredrika Bremer's 'Spirit of the New World'", The New England Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 187
  24. ^ Hellberg (1872), p. 7.
  25. ^ Elmund (1973).
  26. ^ Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 49.
  27. ISBN 9781409448235
    .
  28. ^ Baynes (1878), p. 257.
  29. ^ 18 October 1849.
  30. ^ Rooth (1955), p. 25.
  31. ^ Stendahl (2002), p. 49.
  32. ^ Coustillas, Pierre ed. London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: the Diary of George Gissing, Novelist. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978, p.159.
  33. ^ a b Stendahl (2002), p. 48.
  34. ^ Forsås-Scott (1997), p. 34.
  35. ^ C Fredrika Limnell, urn:sbl:10390, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (art av Sven Erik Täckmark), hämtad 2015-03-15.
  36. ^ "Fredrika Bremer bland lösdriverskorna (En berättelse om kretsen kring Fredrika Bremer)". Archived from the original on 13 August 2019. Retrieved 8 November 2010.

References

Further reading

External links

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