III
Anne Charlotte Leffler was born at Stockholm, and, like all her townsfolk, she was tall, strong, and somewhat angular. She was by nature cold and critical, and in this respect she did not differ from the women of North Sweden. The daughter of a college rector, she had received a thoroughly good education, and was probably far better educated than the majority of women, as she grew up in the companionship of two brothers, who were afterwards professors.
When she was nineteen years of age, she published her first work, a little play, in two acts, called “The Actress.” The piece describes the struggle between love and talent, and the scene is laid in the rather narrow sphere of a small country town. The characters are decidedly weak, but not more so than one would naturally expect from the pen of an inexperienced girl of the upper class. There was nothing to show that it was the work of a beginner. Her faculty for observation is extraordinarily keen, her descriptions of character are terse, striking, and appropriate, and the construction of the piece is clever. It shows a thoughtful mind, and there is none of the clumsy handling noticeable in young writers; the conflict is carefully thought out, and described with mathematical clearness. But however ornate an author’s style, however remarkable her intellect, these qualities do not form the most important part of her talent as a woman and an authoress. In considering the first book of a writer who afterwards became celebrated throughout Europe, the question of primary importance is this: How much character is revealed in this book?
Or, to put the question with greater precision, since it concerns a woman: How much character is there that the author was not able to suppress?
The sky seems colored with the deep glow of dawn; it is the great expectancy of love. Here we have the writing of a young girl who knows nothing about love except the one thing,—that it is a woman’s whole existence. She has never experienced it, but her active mind has already grasped some of its difficulties; and one great difficulty, which must not be overlooked, is the bourgeois desire to maintain a sure footing. An actress is going to marry into a respectable middle-class family. Nobody in this section of society can think of love otherwise than clad in a white apron and armed with a matronly bunch of keys. Love here means the commonplace. The actress is accustomed to a worse but wider sphere; love for her means to become a great actress, to attain perfection in her art, but to her intended it means that she should love him and keep house.
The problem does not often present itself like this in real life, and if it did the result would in all probability be very different; in the imagination of a well-bred girl of eighteen, like Anne Charlotte Leffler, it was the only conclusion possible. And as he will not consent to her wishes, and she refuses to give way to his; as he has no desire to marry an actress, and she no intention of becoming a housewife, they separate with mutual promises of eternal platonic love.
The end is comic, but it is meant to be taken seriously. No matter how it begins, the ordinary woman’s book always ends with platonic love; and it is very characteristic of Anne Charlotte Leffler that her first play should have a platonic and not a tragic ending.
The tragic element, which generally assumes supernatural proportions in the imagination of the young, did not appeal to her; her life was placed in comfortable, bourgeois surroundings, and she was perfectly contented with it.
We find the same want of imagination in all the Swedish authoresses, from Fru Lenngren, Frederica Bremer, and Fru Flygare-Carlén onwards.
A few years later Anne Charlotte Leffler wrote a three-act play, called “The Elf,” of which the two first acts afford the best possible key to her own psychology. It was acted for the first time in 1881, but it was probably written soon after her marriage, in 1872, with Edgren, who was at that time in the service of the government.