As for dancing—a main entertainment of the Värmland gentry—she recalled, in Ett barns memoarer (Memories of My Childhood, 1930), how Erik Gustaf forced her to attend a ball at nearby Sunne, and no one invited her to the floor. Yet, for all one knows, she did not resent this apparently cruel (or encouraging) gesture on her father’s part; receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, the first woman and the first Swede to do so, she directed her acceptance speech to his memory: “I have never met anyone who cherished such love and respect for poetry and poets.”

Like her sisters, Selma was homeschooled, and her sedentary childhood was happy. She began writing stories and verse, borrowing figures from her books, “the sultans of the Arabian Nights, the knights of Walter Scott, the saga-kings of Snorri Stur luson,” Iceland’s medieval historian and poet. Nonetheless, in Ett barns memoarer, she revealed that she was not always placid. She thought she caught Uncle Wachenfeldt cheating at cards, and fell into a fit of rage. Taken off to the children’s room by her mother, she believed she saw a large, dark cave, with a swampy bottom, where a dragon rested, like the monster battled by Saint Göran in Stockholm’s Great Church. “The cave was in myself.”

At fifteen Selma was allowed to enroll in the Advanced Female Teachers’ Seminary in Stockholm; there, according to her stylized account in En saga om en saga (A Tale About a Tale, 1908), she had the illumination that would lead to The Saga of Gösta Berling . Trudging along a drab street with a pack of books after a lesson, she thought of two enormously popular masterpieces that she knew from home. The one was Fredmans epistlar (Fredman’s Epistles, 1790) by Carl Michael Bellman, songs to be sung, as it were, by the denizens of Stockholm’s taverns.1 (Lagerlöf devoted a chapter in Mårbacka to the Bellman songs performed in her home; “love for them stayed in the hearts of the Mårbacka children their whole life through.”) The other work she remembered was Fänrik Ståls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål, 1848, 1860) by the Swedish-speaking Finn Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-77); the Ensign is a veteran of the War of 1808-9, in which Sweden had lost Finland to Russia. The “Tales” are portraits, in verse, of the variously hardbitten or youthful officers and men of the defeated Swedish-Finnish Army. Selma told herself: “The world in which you have lived down there in Värmland is no less remarkable than Fredman’s or Ensign Stål’s. If you can only learn how to treat it, you’ll actually have material just as rewarding.” During a visit at home, Selma heard from her father about a friend from his youth, exceptionally gifted but given to drink, eking out an existence as a tutor and pastoral adjunct. “One fine day,” Selma went on, writing in the third person, “the hero even got a name, and was called Gösta Berling. Where she got the name from, she never knew.” Legions of Lagerlöf specialists have tried to ferret out the model or models for Gösta, just as they have for the majoress—the once beautiful Margareta Celsing, before her forced marriage to the loathsome bear-fancier Major Samzelius and her long affair with her true love, Altringer.

Having finished the teachers’ seminary, Selma found a job at the Elementary School for Girls in Landskrona, across the Öre sund from Copenhagen. She held the post for ten years (1885- 95), taking a leave in 1891 to finish Gösta. She was a well-liked teacher; her subjects were church history, Swedish history, a bit of natural science, and arithmetic. She did not detest foggy south Sweden—Skåne—as Strindberg would during his “exile” (1896- 97) in Lund.2 She thrived in Landskrona’s “Sewing Union” (a hotbed of incipient feminism) and burst into print with theater reviews for the local newspaper. Branching out, she published sonnets as well as play and opera reviews in Dagny, the new woman’s magazine in Stockholm. In 1890 she won first prize in a contest announced by Idun, a woman’s weekly, submitting five chapters that would shortly find their way into Gösta, among them “Ghost Stories.” The judges announced that her entry was “one of the most remarkable belletristic works to have seen the light of day in our country during the most recent decades.”

Yet Selma Lagerlöf also had plenty of familial burdens to bear. Her father, long in failing health (he tried to cure himself with drink), died in the summer before she reported for duty in Landskrona. Mårbacka’s economy had gone from bad to worse in the course of his illness; it passed, catastrophically enough, to brother Johan before the father’s death, and then briefly to sister Gerda and her husband. By 1888 the home was put up for sale at public auction; Selma attended, wanting to see Mårbacka one last time “before strangers take possession of it.” In Landskrona she lived in the loft of her school. But she was not alone as she plugged away at her manuscript. Aunt Lovisa, who “could not realize that she was seventy” and gobbled bonbons, moved in with her, and her widowed mother came to stay from time to time.

The Berling project went through stages. First it was a set of verse “romances,” in the fashion of her father’s favorite Frithiof and Runeberg’s Tales of Ensign Stål, next a drama (one act of which has survived). Finally Lagerlöf settled on short prose narratives, fitted into the frame of twelve months, from Christmas to Christmas, the year the cavaliers ruled the roost at Ekeby, the estate that is the center of action in the novel.

Plenty of ingredients went into Gösta. For example, the uncanny “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet rubbed off on “Ghost Stories.” Selma, of course, had known the tales of Hans Christian Andersen from her earliest years. The sobriquet “The Traveling Companion” that she gave Sophie Elkan—the beautiful, highstrung widow and novelist she met in 1894—was borrowed from Andersen’s story about the “strange fellow” who leads innocent Johannes to happiness through marvelous or frightening lands. Elkan accompanied Selma to Italy and Sicily, a journey that provided the background for Selma’s second novel, Antikrists mirakler (The Miracles of Antichrist, 1897), and to the Holy Land for Jerusalem I-II (1901-2). Zach ris Topelius, another teller of so-called fairytales from Finland, loomed so large for Lagerlöf that she devoted her only biography to him (1920); “his name was surrounded by an aura of beloved and pleasant memories.” Topelius was also famous, in Runeberg’s wake, for Fältskärns berättelser (The Stories of a Field Surgeon, 1857-64), novellas told by still another veteran of the War of 1808-9, about events in Sweden’s and Finland’s history from the death of Gustav II Adolf, the “Swedish Lion” in the Thirty Years’ War, to the start of the reign of Gustav III, Bellman’s art-loving patron.