Life in the Old World

Fredrika Bremer (17 August 1801 31 December 1865) was a Swedish writer and feminist reformer. Her Sketches of Everyday Life were wildly popular in Britain and the United States during the 1840s and 1850s and she is regarded as the Swedish Jane Austen, bringing the realist novel to prominence in Swedish literature. In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV for emancipation from her brother's wardship; in her 50s, her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all unmarried Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden's first female tertiary school. It also inspired Sophie Adlersparre to begin publishing the Home Review, Sweden's first women's magazine. In 1884, she became the namesake of the Fredrika Bremer Association, the first women's rights organization in Sweden.

She began traveling first around Sweden and then abroad. Brockhaus inaugurated its 1841 series Select Library of Foreign Classics (German: Ausgewählte Bibliotek der Classiker des Auslandes) with a translation of Neighbors and its success led them to publish seven other volumes of Bremer's works by the end of the next year. By then, Mary Howitt had begun publishing English translations in London and New York; these proved even more popular in England and United States than the original works had been in Sweden, ensuring her warm welcomes while overseas. After each journey, Bremer published successful volumes of descriptions or diary entries of the locations she visited. Her 1846 visit to the Rhineland prompted her 1848 volumes A Few Leaves from the Banks of the Rhine, Midsummer Journey, and Sibling Life, the last recounting her impressions of the tensions leading up to the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in France.

In this book, and in order to expand her ideas, Frederika Bremer relates with interest her travels in 19th century Europe. She tells her opinions, the opinions of the time but also questions that are still being debated today.

Dettagli