Gangbare naam: Benedictsson, Victoria
Officiële naam: Bruzelius, Victoria Maria
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten: Ahlgren, Ernst
Geboortedatum: 1850-03-06
Overlijdensdatum: 1888-07-23 [1888]
Graflocatie: Vestre Kirkegaard, Copenhagen, Denmark
Geslacht: female
Nationaliteit: Sweden
Geboorteplaats: Domme, Fru Alstads socken, Skytts härad (Now Trelleborg) South Sweden
Plaats van overlijden: Copenhagen, Denmark
Woonplaatsen: Domme, Scania, Sweden
Stockholm, Sverige
Hörby, Sverige
Beroepen: novelist
short story writer
playwright
diarist
Relaties: Brandes, Georg (lover)
Lundegård, Axel (friend)
Korte biografie: Victoria Benedictsson, née Bruzelius, was born to a farming family in the Skåne region on the southern coast of Sweden. Her childhood was marred by her parents' unhappy marriage and their battles over how to raise her. She wished to attend art school in Stockholm and become a painter, but her father refused to allow it. At age 21, in rebellion, she married Christian Benedictsson, a widower 28 years her senior with five children, and had two children of her own. In 1881, she was confined to bed with a knee injury that left her disabled, and began keeping a diary and writing realistic stories about rural life. She published her first collection of stories, Från Skåne (From Skåne), in 1884. It earned her fame and and an invitation to Stockholm, where she was able to participate in Swedish literary circles. She produced other works that are still popular and considered part of the early Scandinavian women's movement, under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren. Among them was a semi-autobiographical first novel, Pengar (Money, 1885). She had an unhappy love affair with Georg Brandes, a prominent Danish literary critic, and committed suicide in Copenhagen at age 38. Her diary was published in the 1970s in three volumes as Stora boken, Dagbok 1882-1888. She is believed to have been the inspiration for Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and August Strindberg's Miss Julie.

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Money (Series B (Norvik Press)) door Victoria Benedictsson

Benedictsson's novel chronicles the marriage and coming-of-age of its protagonist, Selma Berg. An orphan, under the guardianship of her uncle the Rector, she is virtually married off to the wealthy, much older, local Squire. As an adored young wife, she is seemingly given everything she could possibly desire -- an envied position in the community, jewels, a spirited horse that she rides when and where she will, the ability to purchase whatever she wants, freedom enough to visit her family, and an indulgent husband.

But she is disgusted by the physical aspect of her marriage, and her husband is jealous of any attention she attracts from young, unmarried men, including her cousin, Richard, who had been her intellectual sparring partner as they grew up.

As the years pass and Selma moves from late adolescence into young womanhood, she comes more and more to recognize the emptiness of her life. During a visit to the National Art Museum in Stockholm, she happens upon a young artist couple, sketching and painting in the gallery. Immersed in their work, Selma is struck by the futility of her own position. " But she? To vegetate and die -- that was to be her life. Nothing to show for it, be it long or short. To vegetate and die -- calmly and acquiescently."

She realizes that she had not agreed to her marriage as a consenting adult, but had been lured into it as a child, and she decides to make a change. As with Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, we don't know the trajectory of the change. As is the play, this novel is a reflection of the restlessness and dis-ease that women felt with their expected roles in late 19th c. Scandinavia (and Europe and America).… (meer)

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janeajones | Mar 29, 2014 |

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