The second pair of authors was Mona Høvring (modern) and Camilla Collett (foremother). Høvring’s letter starts with a similar reluctance to write as Kjersti Skomsvold expressed; afraid that winter depression will make it a ‘’pitiful letter from the dead to the dead’. Through several instalments over the spring months, confronting ‘the overwhelming painfulness’ of life, she concludes with the rather ironic greeting ‘Lev vel’ (farewell, literally live well), making both the living and the dead author equally alive.

Mona Høvring embeds her address to Camilla Collett in female authors, actresses, artists (and even a couple of politicians, whom she dislikes) quoting from their works or from interviews with them, or reporting that she is reading them. This makes Mona Høvring’s own letter to Camilla Collett deliberately fragmented, more like a patchwork of female texts and lives. For a long time she even questions her own coherence: ‘What is it that I want from you? All this talk. My forwardness in daring to comment on what you are like’. At the end, her aim becomes explicit: ‘I know a lot of heroines, and you are one of them’. Camilla Collett is surrounded by a conglomerate of altogether fourteen women, most of them writers and most of them Swedish. In contrast, Høvring mentions only four men, thus constructing a reversed image of the usual descriptions of the contexts and influences of an authorship. The authorship that is contextualized in this manner is also, and primarily, Høvring’s own, which illustrates the point of the whole exercise: seeing the connections between foremothers and living authors.

The fourteen women that surround Camilla Collett in Høvring’s letter include George Sand (whom Collett also refers to: Sand’s childhood memories have awakened her own, she says), and Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. Even a joking PS about mixing mustard in her liquor is an allusion to a female storyteller in the subtext of Collett’s book (below). More than specific works and examples, however, she weaves a net of voices that are all about the experience of reading, writing, talking about books, combining art with motherhood, battling the dark forces within and without. There is relatively little of Collett in the letter. Høvring had already published a little book called Camillas lange netter (Camilla’s long nights) (2013), where she gives a sort of modern digest of Collett’s memoirs I de lange Nætter (in the long nights) of a hundred-and-fifty years before (1863). In her letter to Collett for the Festival, she keeps addressing ‘Dear Camilla’; it is as if Collett is being pulled into Høvring’s life and reading, more than the other way round. (She even explains to Camilla that her portrait is found on the tail of an airplane, drawing her forcibly into modern times.) After all, perhaps this is the true artistic way of relating to a literary foremother: where academics try to study the author of the past, the creative writer looks for connections to her own work/experience.