The young Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson published her first novel Pengar (Money) in 1885, under the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren. The novel is set in rural southern Sweden where the author lived, and follows the fortunes of Selma Berg, a girl whose fate has much in common with that of Madame Bovary and Ibsen's Nora. The gifted young Selma is forced to give up her dreams of going to art school when her uncle persuades her to marry, at the age of sixteen, a rich older squire. Profoundly shocked by her wedding night and by the mercenary nature of the marriage transaction, she finds herself...