Penwoman (Norvik Press Series B: English Translations of Scandinavian Literature)

Wagner was one of the ""New Women"" prominent in the literature and culture of the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States. While continuing as a journalist, she began to write innovative fiction in the bold spirit of contemporaries she admired, among them Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and Vera Brittain. She was born in Lund in southern Sweden in 1882. Her mother died when she was three. Although an aunt came to fill the gap, Elin felt the loss all her life and expressed it in many ways in her writing. Her father, a minister and school principal, sent her brother Harald to university but refused to do the same for Elin. She dropped out of high school in anger. After serving as her father's secretary for a short time, she created her own career in journalism, starting as a reviewer and reporter for a local paper. Before long she moved to Stockholm, where for many years she was a successful reporter, columnist, and reviewer for the liberal daily Dagens Nyheter. This, her second novel, is about, about suffragettes in Stockholm. It appeared in 1910. The protagonist, a journalist, plans to maintain her independence in a liberated marriage as she continues to be active in the struggle for women's rights.