II
She was the supporter of a movement that originated with her, and ceased when she died. She was known in countries far beyond her native Sweden; her books were read and discussed all over Germany, and her stories were published in the Deutsche Rundschau. She had a clearer brain than most women writers; she could look reality in the face without being afraid, and indeed she was not one who was easily frightened. She was very independent, and understood the literary side of her calling as well as its practical side, and her struggles were by no means confined to her writings. She threw aside the old method of seeking to gain her ends by means of womanly charm; she wanted to convince as a woman of intellect. She condemned the old method which used to be considered the special right of women, and fought for the new right, i.e., recognition as a human being. All her arguments were clear and temperate; she was not emotional. The minds from which she fashioned her own were Spencer and Stuart Mill. Nature had endowed her with a proud, straightforward character, and she was entirely free from that affected sentimentality which renders the writings of most women unendurable.
In the course of ten years she became celebrated throughout Europe, and she died suddenly about six months after the birth of her first child. Sonia Kovalevsky, the other and greater European celebrity, who was Professor of Mathematics, and her most intimate friend, also died suddenly, as did several others,—Victoria Benediktson (Ernst Ahlgren), her fellow-countrywoman, and for many years her rival; Adda Ravnkilde, a young Danish writer, who wrote several books under her influence; and a young Finnish authoress named Thedenius. The last three died by their own hands; Sonia Kovalevsky and Fru Edgren-Leffler died after a short illness.
Fru Leffler was the eldest,—she lived to be forty-three; the others died younger,—the last two very much younger. But they all made the same attempt, and they all failed. They wanted to stand alone, they demanded their independence, they tried to carry into practice their views with regard to man.
George Sand made the same attempt, and she succeeded. But then her independence took a very different form from theirs. She followed the traditions of her family, and set no barriers to love; she drank of the great well of life until she had well-nigh exhausted it. She was quite a child of the old régime in her manner of life. The efforts made by these other women, at the close of the nineteenth century, took the form of wishing to dispense with man altogether. It is this feature of Teutonic chastity, bounding on asceticism, that was the tragic moment in the lives of all these short-lived women.
It is a strange piece of contemporary history of which I am about to write. It is this that is the cause of the despondent mood peculiar to the last decade of our century; it is this that acts as a weight upon our social life, that makes our leisure wearisome, our joys cold. It is this decay in woman’s affection that is the greatest evil of the age.
One of the tendencies of the time is the craving for equality, which seeks to develop woman’s judgment by increasing her scientific knowledge. It might have answered from the woman’s point of view, so far, at least, as the man was concerned, for it does not much matter to a woman whom she loves, as long as she loves some one. But women have become so sensible nowadays that they refuse to love without a decisive guarantee, and this calculating spirit has already become to them a second nature to so great an extent that they can no longer love, without first taking all kinds of precautionary measures to insure their future peace and comfortable maintenance, to say nothing of the unqualified regard which they expect from their husbands.
All things are possible from a state of mind such as we have described, except love, and love cannot flourish upon it. If there is a thing for which woman is especially created,—that is, unless she happens to be different from other women,—it is love. A woman’s life begins and ends in man. It is he who makes a woman of her. It is he who creates in her a new kind of self-respect by making her a mother; it is he who gives her the children whom she loves, and to him she owes their affection. The more highly a woman’s mind and body are developed, the less is she able to dispense with man, who is the source of her great happiness or great sorrow, but who, in either case, is the only meaning of her life. For without him she is nothing.
The woman of to-day is quite willing to enjoy the happiness which man brings, but when the reverse is the case, she refuses to submit. She thinks that, with a little precaution, she can bring the whole of life within the compass of a mathematical calculation. But before she has finished her sum, and proved it to see if it is correct, happiness and sorrow have flown past her, leaving her desolate and forsaken,—hardened for want of love, miserable in spite of a cleverly calculated marriage, and imbittered in the midst of joyless ease and sorrow unaccounted for.
Such was the fate of these five short-lived authoresses, although they might not have described it as I have done. Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler was chief among the Scandinavian women’s rights women who have made for themselves a name in literature. Her opinions were scattered abroad among thousands of women in Germany and in the North, and as she died without being able to dig up the seed which she had sown, she will always be considered as a type of the fin de siècle woman, and will remain one of its historical characters.
I write this sketch in the belief that it will not be very unlike the one she would have written of herself, had she lived long enough to do so.