Benedictsson, Victoria

(1850-1888)

   A Swedish novelist and short story writer, Benedictsson wrote under the male pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren. Raised as a tomboy by her father, her life was a bit like that of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, a character that was modeled after her. When her father refused to let her go to Stockholm to study art, Victoria married a widower 28 years her senior. The marriage allowed her time to write, and she had her debut with a collection of short stories, Fran Skane (1884; From Skane). Her novel Pengar (1885; Money) told about the life of a protagonist named Selma who would like to pursue art but marries an older man, and who then achieves independence. Like many other Scandinavian novels of the 1870s and 1880s, it was very critical of social conditions. Benedictsson expresses her indignation as a means to reform, however, rather than just for its own sake.

   A second volume of short stories bears the title Folkliv och smaberattelser (1887; Folk Life and Minor Stories). The same year she published her second novel, Fru Marianne (1987; Mrs. Marianne), which she had written specifically to impress the Danish critic Georg Brandes, with whom she had fallen in love. The novel argues for monogamous relations between the sexes and tells about an upper-class woman who marries a farmer and adjusts just fine to her new life. Brandes was not impressed, and Benedictsson committed suicide by slitting her throat in a cheap hotel in Copenhagen.

   See also Women.