In 1897 she moved to Falun, the old mining town in Dalecarlia, a neighboring province to Värmland, and just as rich in local lore; it had a distinctive literary (and supernatural) nimbus because of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Mines at Falun.” Lagerlöf’s younger sister Gerda lived there with her husband, as did a sturdy friend from Landskrona days, Valborg Olander, of whom Sophie Elkan, the traveling companion, was not a little jealous. The year of Lagerlöf’s honorary doctorate at Uppsala, 1907, her aunt Lovisa died, and, for the funeral, Selma returned to Värmland and to look in on Mårbacka, purchasing it in 1910. She transformed it into a profitable farm, run by herself, supported by a large staff. A keen businesswoman, she produced super-healthy oatmeal, labeled “Mårbacka Oats-Power.” Mårbacka attracted so many sightseers and wellwishers that she had trouble finding the peace to write. Greta Garbo tried to drop in on her in the summer of 1935, but she was in the hospital at Karlstad. They met the next year in Stockholm; Lagerlöf’s theatrical adaptation of The Saga of Gösta Berling had had its premiere there in March 1935, to mixed reviews. Only nineteen, Garbo had played the role of Elisabet in Mauritz Stiller’s silent film of 1924, called, in English, The Atonement of Gösta Berling.

Lagerlöf fell afoul of the Nazi propaganda machine after 1933 for bringing Jewish intellectuals, such as her biographer Walter Berendsohn and the poet Nelly Sachs, to safety in Sweden. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30, 1939, she hesitated to think of her country going to its neighbor’s aid, lest the Russians retaliate, “a hard fate for old Sweden.” Nevertheless, she gave to the beleaguered Finns all the gold medals she had received over the long course of her career. She died at Mårbacka on March 16, 1940, her sister Gerda at her side. In a last letter to a friend, she told her not to brood so much: “You know that we human beings haven’t been vouchsafed the gift of looking into God’s council chamber.”

 

The success and example of The Saga of Gösta Berling may have encouraged Verner von Heidenstam—a future Nobel Prize winner (1916)—to complete Karolinerna (The Charles Men, 1897-98), a double series of carefully wrought novellas centered on Charles XII, the “warrior king” whose extravagant military adventures started the destruction of the Swedish Empire. The ten interconnected novellas of the Norwegian Tryggve Andersen’s I Cancelliraadens Dage (In the Days of the Councillor, 1897), take place in a backwater of the Napoleonic Wars.5 Sigrid Undset’s novels from medieval Norway, collectively called after their heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter, appeared from 1920 on, expanding on a world Lagerlöf had briefly entered in the novellas of Drottningar i Kungahälla (Queens of Kungahälla, 1899). It has been suggested that the sudden fame of Undset, younger by a quarter of a century (and a Nobel Prize winner, 1928), prompted the aging Lagerlöf to embark on her set of novels that move from the age of Charles XII to, principally, the 1830s in Värmland: Löwensköldska ringen (The Ring of the Löwenskölds, 1925); Charlotte Löwensköld (1925); and Anna Svärd (1928). Was envy a creative stimulus here? Long ago, Lagerlöf herself had been the target of envy: Strindberg planned to do a caricature of her as “Tekla Lagerlök” (Laurel-Onion) in his hateful Svarta fanor (Black Banners, 1907), and, never a recipient of the Nobel Prize, he harrumphed that “some people value my dramatic production (forty plays) more highly than the Great Selma’s Novels.” (Did he remember that, in 1887, he had written a very popular novel, Hemsöborna [The People of Hemsö], whose hero, the Värmlander Carlsson, plays a trick on the drunken Pastor Nordström even more drastic than the one Gösta and his fellows play on Captain Lennart?) During Isak Dinesen’s (Karen Blixen’s) years in Africa, authorial envy may again have been at work. Blixen refused to agree that, as the manageress of a coffee farm, she in any way resembled the pipe-smoking majoress. Grabbing an opening provided by an American correspondent, she allowed that great writers, such as “Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, and Lagerlöf, are likely to lose something of their talent in later years,” a thrust at the Löwensköld cycle. Surely, the author of Seven Gothic Tales and Winter’s Tales had learned from Lagerlöf, whose books were on the library shelves at Blixen’s Mbogani House.

The Saga of Gösta Berling came out in German in 1896, the first of what would be six translations. Marie Herzfeld, the lit erarily acute friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, touted it in the climactic essay of Die skandinavische Literatur und ihre Tendenzen (Scandinavian Literature and its Tendencies, 1898): “a mixture of adventure novel, educational novel [bildungsroman, high praise in the German critical vocabulary], and psychological novel.” Thomas Mann quickly became a faithful reader of the author of “the old tale” of Gösta Berling (calling it a Mär, a word suggestive of the Nibelungenlied!). For Rainer Maria Rilke Gösta was “incomparable” and, like Mann, he closely followed Lagerlöf’s production (even trying to read Nils Holgersson in the original Swedish). But he gave up on her in the midst of reading Bannlyst (The Outcast, 1918, strangely called Das Heilige Leben, “The Holy Life,” in German), not grasping that the murderer Lamprecht was still another of Lagerlöf’s arrogant and egotistical specimens of evil, a theme first broached in Sintram and then in the Scots mercenaries’ home invasion and mass-murder of Herr Arnes penningar (Sir Arne’s Hoard, 1903), which was turned into a play, Winterballade, by Gerhart Hauptmann, in the war year 1917. From his Swiss refuge in 1920, Rilke wrote, about Das Heilige Leben: “I was quite cross with this old school marm” and “there’s no depending on Selma Lagerlöf any longer.” Paul Géraldy, the French playwright and master of the bon mot, compared Lagerlöf to Homer; Marguérite Yourcenar, the author of Hadrian’s Memoirs, devoted a major essay to the “conteuse épique,” concluding with praise of the “admirable tales, pure as the unpolluted lakes of Värmland,” and especially one of the paralipomena to Gösta, “A Tale from Halstanäs,” in Osynliga länkar, on the later years of Colonel Beerencreutz. Russia welcomed Iosta Berling with open arms (from 1904 on); the scholar Maria Nikolayeva proposes that Värmland’s estate life seemed immediately familiar to an audience steeped in Turgenev, and Vivi Edström sees a “direct correspondence” between pious Ebba Dohna and Lisaveta Michailovna, who enters a cloister in A Nest of Gentlefolk. (Nikolayeva also wonders if Lagerlöf’s easy switches from the real to the fantastic, as in “Ghost Stories,” rubbed off on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.) The music historian Alan Mallach has recently claimed that Riccardo Zandonai’s opera I cavalieri di Ekebù (1925), with a libretto by Arturo Rossato, is not an oddity but rather a gem in the “autumn” of Italian verismo. Zandonai-Rossato emphasize the dark side of Lagerlöf’s vision: the villains, Samzelius and Sintram, have much dirty work to do; the majoress, “la Comandante,” is allotted a telling mezzo-soprano part; and the loves of a tormented “Giosta” are reduced to one, a frightened Anna. The orchestration—plenty of bass clarinet, bassoon, and tuba—is heavy, the incessant percussion effects eerie.

In the Anglophone world, Gösta got several translations from 1898 on, by Pauline Bancroft Flach, Lillie Tudeer, and Robert Bly (a revision of Flach), but has never found a critical champion, or been taken quite seriously. Peter Graves has tracked down Lagerlöf’s reputation in England. Not very apt comparisons have been made with Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, among others. D.