An economical and haunting tale, published in book form in 1904 and set in the sixteenth century on the snowbound west coast of Sweden, Lord Arne's Silver is a classic from the pen of an author consummately skilled in the deployment of narrative power and ambivalence. A story of robbery and murder, retribution, love, and betrayal, plays out against the backdrop of the stalwart fishing community of the archipelago. Young Elsalill, sole survivor of the mass killing in the home of rich cleric Lord Arne, becomes a pawn in dangerous games both earthly and supernatural.

This is the first full-length study in English of the oeuvre of Elin Wagner - feminist, suffragist, pacifist and environmentalist - and also the first to include texts representing a wide range of genres. The focus on gender and community, studied in relation to dominant and alternative discourses, shows a number of Wagner's texts to be considerably more radical than has been observed previously. Some of them are found to have outlined bold alternatives to the Swedish welfare state, and the combination of gender and environmentalism in some of the late texts anticipated much more recent...

Written in 1899, Selma Lagerlof's novella A Manor House Tale is at one and the same time a complex psychological novel and a folk tale, a love story and a Gothic melodrama. It crosses genre boundaries and locates itself in a borderland between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, darkness and light, possession and loss, life and death. Lagerlof's two young characters, Gunnar and Ingrid, the one driven to madness by the horrific death of his goats in a blizzard, the other falling into a death-like trance as a result of the absence of familial warmth, rescue each other from their...

The curse on the Lowenskold family comes to fruition in unexpected ways in this final volume of the Lowenskold cycle. Anna Svard is also very much a novel of women's struggle toward finding fulfillment. The Lowenskold Ring resonates with 'beggars cannot be choosers' in relation to what a poor woman can expect in life, while Charlotte Lowenskold moves toward women having some choices. In Anna Svard the eponymous protagonist takes full and impressive control of her own life and destiny. The question of motherhood and the fates of the children with whom the characters engage is another theme....

What happens to an individual who is rejected by society? What happens to a society that eventually realises the living are more important than the dead, and that it is suffering a crisis of values and priorities? What does war do to us and to our outlook on the world? Selma Lagerloef struggled with these issues throughout World War I and experienced a mental block in writing about them. Then she found an opening and produced a thought-provoking tale of love, death and survival that grapples with moral dilemmas as relevant today as they were a century ago. Selma Lagerloef (1858-1940)...