It was at this time that the celebrated mathematician, Sonia Kovalevsky, was appointed to the high school at Stockholm at the instigation of Fru Edgren’s brother, Professor Mittag-Leffler, and the two women became the greatest of friends. Sonia Kovalevsky had practiced the principles of women’s rights and asceticism in her own married life, and was now, after her husband had shot himself, a widow.
She was probably Björnson’s model in more than one of his books, and she combined Russian fanaticism with the Russian capacity to please. She had not been long at Stockholm before the war broke loose. Strindberg raged against women, ignoring Fru Edgren and others on the plea that they could not be reckoned as women, since they had no children. Björnson and Fru Edgren were everywhere welcomed at women’s meetings as the champions of women’s rights.
For four or five years Sonia Kovalevsky and Fru Edgren were almost inseparable. Fru Edgren took back her maiden name of Leffler after her separation from her husband. The two friends were always travelling. They went to Norway, France, England, etc., together, and Fru Leffler wrote her longest novel, “A Tale of Summer.” It was the old problem of love and the artistic temperament. A highly gifted artist falls in love with a commonplace schoolmaster,—she nervous, refined, independent; he young, big, strong, true-hearted, and very like a trusty Newfoundland dog. It does not answer. An artist must not marry, the most learned of Newfoundland dogs cannot understand an artist, and yet artists have a most unfortunate preference for Newfoundland dogs.
There was something in this novel that was not to be found in any of her earlier works,—a hasty, uneven beat of the pulse, something of the fever of awakened passion.
Sonia, meantime, was engaged with her work for the Prix Bordin; but she had scarcely begun her studies before she left them to devote herself to a parallel romance, about which she was very much excited. It was called “The Struggle for Happiness: How it Was, and How it Might Have Been.” She persuaded Fru Leffler to give this thought a dramatic setting, and she was very anxious to have it published. It was nothing more or less than a hymn to love, which had fast begun to set flame to her ungovernable Russian blood. Fru Leffler wrote the piece, but it proved an utter failure.
On her travels she made the acquaintance of the Duke of Cajanello, a mathematician, who was probably introduced to her by Sonia Kovalevsky He was professor at the Lyceum at Naples, and Fru Leffler appears to have fallen suddenly and passionately in love. Her last novel bears witness to this fact; like the former one, it treats of “Love and Womanhood,” but here the proof of true womanliness lies in the loving. She was divorced from her husband and went to Italy. Liberty, love, and the South,—all were hers at last.
She had something else besides to satisfy her ambition as a society lady, when, in May, 1890, she became the Duchess of Cajanello. After her marriage she paid a visit to Stockholm with her husband, and every one thought that she looked younger, more gentle, more womanly, and happier than she had ever done before.
After the marriage, her friendship with Sonia Kovalevsky was at an end. The latter had not found happiness in loving, and she died in the year 1891.
The Duchess of Cajanello lived at Naples, and in her forty-third year she experienced for the first time the happiness of becoming a mother. When she died, the little duke was scarcely more than six months old. Up to the last few days of her life, she was to all appearances happy and in good health. Her last work was the life of her friend Sonia Kovalevsky. In writing it she fulfilled the promise which they had made, that whichever of the two survived should write the life—a living portrait it was to be—of the other. She had just begun to correct the proofs before she died. On the last day before her illness, she worked till three o’clock in the afternoon at a novel called “A Narrow Horizon,” which was left unfinished. She died after a few days’ illness.
Fru Edgren-Leffler belonged to that class of women whose senses slumber long because their vital strength gives them the expectation of long youth. But when the day comes that they are awakened, the same vitality that had kept them asleep overflows with an intensity that attracts like a beacon on a dark night. It is the woman who attracts the man, not the reverse. Fru Edgren-Leffler found in her fortieth year that which she had sought for in vain in her twentieth and thirtieth,—love! The unfruitful became fruitful; the emaciated became beautiful; the woman’s rights woman sang a hymn to the mystery of love; and the last short years of happiness, too soon interrupted by death, were a contradiction to the long insipid period of literary production.