In chapter 4, “Gösta Berling, the Poet,” Gösta throws the three volumes, bound in red leather, of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou L’Italie (1814-15) to the wolves, pursuing him and Anna Stjärnhök through the winter night, as he sets forth in his sleigh to save Anna from marriage to ugly, old Dahlberg. Does this mean that The Saga of Gösta Berling will triumph over de Staël’s protracted tale of the fiery Corinne’s passion for the considerably less passionate Lord Oswald Nelvil? That Lagerlöf’s Värmland, in the North, is just as exciting as Corinne’s Italy, with its art treasures so minutely described?

Lagerlöf was a patriot of her native province, tucked up against the Norwegian border, and the birthplace of great men—Tegnér; the historian Anders Fryxell (a very old man Selma knew in her childhood and celebrated in Mårbacka); the poet Erik Gustaf Geijer, Tegnér’s contemporary. One of Geijer’s often anthologized poems describes the independent peasant (one likes to think, from Värmland), another the charcoal burners who provided the fuel for the rural iron foundries attached to the Värmland estates. Geijer devoted a picturesque segment of his memoirs to this grand form of cottage industry; his father owned a foundry at Ransäter, not far from Gösta Berling country. The foundries were on the brink of their decline in the 1820s, when the novel is set; they would fall victim to the railroads and city factories. Water transportation from Ekeby, on the route taken by the cavaliers in chapter 17, “Iron from Ekeby,” was no longer necessary, nor were the countryside foundries. A nostalgia for the Värmland of the past emerged decades before Lagerlöf conceived Gösta—in Wermlänningarne, “tragic-comic speech, song, and dance play” (1846), by Fredrik August Dahlgren with music by Andreas Randel. (Oklahoma! might be a rough American equivalent.) Gösta’s success was prepared, in some measure, by Dahlgren and Randel’s beloved quasi-operetta.

Sven Stolpe has made the alluring proposal that Gösta is, in fact, a series of “little operas,” with verbal arias, melodramatic situations, and, above all, the outsized emotions to be found in the nineteenth-century repertoire. And, as every operagoer knows, the characters in Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, are controlled by a God often appealed to or railed against. Just so in Gösta; in its “Prologue” or overture, the majoress says, when Gösta wants to lay himself down and die: “Oh, you may fly boldly, you wild birds, but our Lord knows the net that will catch you.” Never missing the chance for self-dramatization, Gösta agrees: “He is a great and strange God. . . . He has eluded me and rejected me, but he will not let me die. His will be done!”

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The full manuscript of Gösta was accepted by Fritiof Hellberg’s “humbug-house” in Stockholm, the derogatory term coined by the novelist Bo Bergman, who had seen the samples in Idun and looked forward to the book’s publication in a worthier venue. Some reviews were favorable: the young poet Gustaf Fröding, from Värmland, destined to become one of Sweden’s greatest poets, liked the way his compatriot conjured up the glories of their common home. Major critics were far less enthusiastic. The dean of the critical corps, Karl Warburg, thought Gösta was a “mightily strange narration” and was irritated by “the unnaturalness of the style” (his italics). He recommended that the authoress undertake “retellings of folk-tales . . . which she ought to be able to reproduce with a poetic mood.” A crueler blow was delivered by Carl David af Wirsén, the powerful secretary of the Swedish Academy; he compared Gösta to antiquated, sentimental novels aimed at a female audience. Composing the “modern” part of a monumental history of Sweden’s literature (1911), Warburg made torturous amends: “The faults of the book, which at first caught the eyes of professional critics and which, in several quarters, caused an undervaluing of its merits, were partly its jumpy, rather loose structure . . . and partly its uncontestedly, albeit not uncontested, mannered style.” Wirsén opposed Lagerlöf’s selection for the Nobel Prize, trying instead to advance the candidacy of Algernon Charles Swinburne, of all people.

A sea change in The Saga of Gösta Berling’s fortunes came shortly; the above-mentioned Georg Brandes wrote his glowing review of the Danish translation for the tone-setting newspaper Politiken. Just returned from a Christmas vacation in Copenhagen, Selma sent her mother a clipping, “nice to read after Warburg and Wirsén, for Brandes is the most distinguished man in the North.” He made no bones about his enthusiasm for “the material’s surprising singularity and the originality of the presentation,” going on to the “narrative’s rhythmically fluid, often quite simply lyric style. Privately, the authoress must have written a great deal of verse in order to achieve this prose.” Gösta’s variety was wonderful: “[Lagerlöf] wanted to paint not a picture but a whole picture-gallery.” Yet Brandes, too, unmindful of the consequences, gave his authority to the notion of Lagerlöf as a “naïve” artist: “her warm, living imagination is like a child’s. Exactly like a child’s.” The child is full of surprises: “We are led along detours until, without being prepared, we suddenly stand face to face with what the author wants to show us.”

Immediately, Selma Lagerlöf was recruited by the ambitious publisher Karl Otto Bonnier and became a luminary of his stable, to the financial advantage of them both. The story collection Osynliga länkar (Invisible Links) appeared at Bonniers in 1894, followed by a new edition of Gösta, acquired from Hellberg, in 1895, the year Selma resigned from her teaching post.