Dutch women writers can’t be understood separately from their international context – and the same goes for other European, late 19th-century women writers. Take Selma Lagerlöf, for example, the famous Swedish writer of (among others) The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: we can’t ignore her in the timeframe around 1900. Her work could be found in many Dutch libraries, and many of her Dutch colleagues admired her.
Anna de Savornin Lohman, a very productive Dutch novelist, journalist and polemist, writes an article in 1904 about Lagerlöf’s novels Gösta Berling and Ingrid. In the latter novel she admires
“an idea so wonderfully graceful and pure, double in our time of realism and feminism, of everything cold, cool, cruel, rational, in contrast with feminine softness and serving love. […] What a joy to think that it is a woman, a contemporary woman, that can write such a book!”
But Anna de Savornin Lohman is not simply moved: she also places caustic comments about women who think differently about feminine roles: “What a joy to know that among the gang of scribbling men-women, all over the world, who do nothing else than reasoning about her ‘duties to herself’, and her ‘rights’ and her ‘injustice’ and her ‘oppression’, who shout against ‘the slavery of marriage’, etc. etc., someone has risen as Selma Lagerlöf.”
Ten year later, Amy de Leeuw, who published articles in the press from a very young age “because she had something to say”, wrote an article about Lagerlöf as well. She had traveled to Sweden to meet her. De Leeuw was very much impressed by her: “one can write miraculous fairytales and still be a sensible human.” So when she and Lagerlöf talk about feminism, they couldn’t have agreed more: “When we discussed this issue, we completely agreed, that everything that is unnatural in feminism, will automatically dissolve itself, although many follies and casualties have to happen first.”
Did so much change in the perception of Lagerlöf in those ten years, or is Anna de Savornin Lohman an exceptional case?