Collett, Camilla

(1813-1895)

   A Norwegian novelist, Collett is the sister of the well-known Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland. Collett received a traditional education for upper-class girls at the time, which left her unhappy about the place of women in her society. When she fell in love with Johan Sebastian Welhaven,the enemy of her brother and father, she was further angered by the injustice of her situation, and her diaries and letters from the 1830s testify to the despair with which she reacted when Welhaven told her that their mutual attraction could not lead to marriage. In 1841 she married Peter Jonas Collett, who encouraged her to write, and she did some writing while raising her four children.

   Widowed in 1851, however, she focused increasingly on her literary work and soon published Amtmandens Døttre (1854-1855; tr. The District Governor's Daughters, 1992), which drew extensively on her own experiences and observations. Thematically Norway's first modern novel, its narrative technique is fairly traditional, as it includes letters and excerpts from diaries, numerous apostrophes to the reader, and a fairly convoluted syntax. None of the district governor's four daughters enjoys a happy marriage, as their parents give more weight to social considerations than to love when their daughters are married off. Collett's novel is an effective piece of social criticism.

   Collett followed up the success of Amtmandens Døttre with a book of memoirs, I de lange Nætter (1862; During the Long Nights), which tells about her youth and offers vivid portraits of her father and brother. Most of her other writings from her later years were highly polemical; a representative title is Fra de Stummes Leir (1877; From the Encampment of the Mute), which criticizes what she sees as the almost universal denigration of women by male writers.