Selma Lagerlöf (Swedish, 1858-1940)
Lagerlöf worked as a country schoolteacher for nearly 10 years while working as a writer, focusing on stories from her own childhood. She began her first novel, Gösta Berling’s Saga, when she was still teaching.
In 1894 she met Sophie Elkan, also a writer, who became her friend and companion and with whom she fell in love. Lagerlöf’s letters to Sophie Elkan, You Teach Me to Be Free (Du lär mig att bli fri), published in 1992, tell a passionate love story that began in 1894 and apparently remained the most important relationship of Lagerlöf’s life until Elkan’s death in 1921.
A writer from a Jewish merchant family in Gothenburg, Elkan accompanied Lagerlöf on trips to Italy, Jerusalem, and Egypt. Lagerlöf dedicated her novel Jerusalem I (1901) to “Sophie Elkan, my companion in life and letters.”
Lagerlöf’s book, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, is about a young boy whose “chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief.”
The boy goes on an adventure with a domestic farm goose and is eventually joined by wild geese in a journey across the historic provinces of Sweden. The domestic goose needs to prove his ability to fly like the experienced wild geese, and Nils needs to prove to the geese that he would be a useful companion.
[...] Tiergarten suburb of Berlin. . . . As a young girl of fifteen she began a correspondence with Selma Lagerlof, the Swedish writer, a connection that would prove crucial to her survival when the war years began [...]