The field surgeon is particularly proud of the fact that he has been a “reader of many books,” altogether like Selma, and that he was born the same day as Napoleon: two striking characters in Gösta—vain, superficial Countess Märta Dohna and brave cousin Kristoffer—are leftovers from the Napoleonic Age.

Living when and where she did, Lagerlöf of course knew her Ibsen. Peer Gynt’s sudden condemnation of his drunken and extremely inventive dreaming, “lies and damned poetry,” in the second act of that great verse play (1864), is quoted in Gösta in one of Lagerlöf’s numerous authorial interruptions, at the end of chapter 11: “Oh, latter-day children! I do not ask anyone to give credence to these old stories. They may be nothing more than lies and poetry.” Gregers Werle, whose persuasive tales cause the suicide of young Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884), is called by Ibsen “the thirteenth man at table,” like Gösta’s Sintram, the would-be devil at the Christmas Eve feast, whose suborning of the cavaliers leads to the expulsion of the majoress, and the year of their misrule. Sintram roams the roads around the lake called Löven (Fryken in geographic fact), “seeking the ruin of souls,” like Satan in the prayer to Saint Michael at the end of the Tridentine Mass. His relations with the evil one are left murky in The Saga of Gösta Berling: Is he truly in league with the devil or rather a destructive and deranged meddler?

Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller (Either-Or, 1843) was among Lagerlöf’s many books in the Landskrona loft, even though abstruse texts were not customarily her cup of tea. She made her way as far as the chapter titled “The Direct Erotic Stages of the Musical Erotic,” Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, helping to form her image of Gösta Berling as a seducer. Also, it is tempting to conjecture that Lagerlöf, living in the cultural ambiance of Copenhagen, read the Danish classic Phantasterne (The Phantasts, 1857) of Hans Egede Schack. Its narrator, Con rad Malcolm, eventually is able to turn his daydreaming to positive ends; his friend Christian is destroyed by dreaming; a third comrade, stolid Thomas, is no dreamer at all. At the end of chapter 10, “The Young Countess,” Gösta salutes the dream in his great speech to the somnolent and grumpy cavaliers: “Of all the things that hands have built, what is there that has not fallen or will not fall? Oh, people, throw down the trowel and the clay form! Spread the mason’s apron over your head and lie down to build the bright palace of dreams!”

However, Gösta’s longest dream of love, his passion for the young countess, will lead to his quite unromantic marriage with her, in order to give a legal father to her as yet unborn child, by her doltish husband. (The poor infant expires straightaway.) He will settle down with her, working at his lathe, a friend to the poor, a humble peasant fiddler in the lonely forest croft. One wonders if this forced happy ending (viewed with considerable skepticism by Lagerlöf’s first Swedish biographer, Elin Wägner) draws on the plan of Goethe’s Faust (in part two) to drain swamps and serve mankind thereby. Otherwise, the echoes of Faust in Gösta are detectible enough, or, for that matter, all too obvious—for example, the pact with the devil (Sintram as a provincial Mephistopheles). In the final lines of Faust, “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (The Eternal Womanly / draws us onward and upward); in Lagerlöf’s finale, Gösta is saved by Elisabet and by the majoress who expires to the sound of the foundry’s hammer. The cavaliers have at last undertaken honest work.

Elisabet—who shares a name with Wagner’s redemptress in Tannhäuser—has delivered her lecture, “heroic gestures, heroic ostentation,” to Gösta, who is lying bound on the floor. As is Gösta’s wont, he offers an excuse: “We cavaliers are not free men. . . . We have promised one another to live for happiness and only for happiness.” Elisabet rejoins, “Woe to you . . . that you should be the most cowardly among the cavaliers and last in improvement of any of them!” Lagerlöf came to love the pattern of the man gone astray, redeemed by the savior woman; in En herrgårdssägen (From a Swedish Homestead, 1899), the mad peddler-and-peasant-fiddler, “Billy Goat,” is restored to his former handsome and cultured self, the estate owner and violinist Gunnar Hede, by the psychoanalytical skills of Ingrid, the frail girl whom Billy Goat, despite his madness, has saved from being buried alive. In Lagerlöf’s last completed novel, Anna Svärd (1928), the ex-pastor Karl-Artur Ekenstedt—formerly silly, self-righteous, destructive—returns to Värmland after seven years of rehabilitation as a missionary in Africa, and approaches the cottage of his long-neglected wife, the eponymous Anna Svärd. The reader never finds out what happens: does she continue her interrupted labor of his salvation?

Lagerlöf frankly revealed the impact Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution had made on her as she wrote Gösta. The “people from the woods” march on the cavaliers in chapter 32, “The Girl from Nygård”—“dark, embittered men jostle down toward Ekeby’s great estate; hungry women with crying children on their arms.” Moreover, Carlyle’s urgent rhetoric, engaging and stirring his audience, informs Lagerlöf’s own apostrophic style. Similarly, the powerful and often abusive language of the prophets in the Old Testament crops up whenever the theme of “God’s storm” appears. Like other Swedish children of her time, Lagerlöf had been spoon-fed on the cadences of the Charles XII Bible, an equivalent to the King James version. As the chapters “Drought” and “The Girl from Nygård” richly prove, Lagerlöf possessed a particular genius for panoramas of disaster, and there are several such passages in her work: the slow death of a herd of two hundred goats, freezing in the forest, which touches off the madness of Gunnar Hede; the sinking of the passenger liner L’Univers in Jerusalem I, an uncanny foreshadowing of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg; the drowned sailors after the Battle of Jutland, floating in their lifejackets, their eyes picked out by gulls, in Bannlyst (The Outcast, 1918). Sometimes her biblical allusions are quietly hilarious. Congratulating Squire Julius on his retinue of happy girls, she writes, “Fortunate are they who can rejoice at the sunshine of life and do not need a gourd to shield their head!” Here she’s referring to God’s gracious effort to console Jonah in his discontent after his adventure with the whale: “And the Lord prepared a gourd and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head to deliver him from his grief.”

Once Gösta had become a Swedish bestseller, marketing efforts were made to emphasize the festive, jovial existence of Gösta Berling and his crew.