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Napoleon is buried in the Dome des Invalides, a chapel in this building. The Tuileries. The palace of the French kings in Paris. Uhlans. Prussian cavalrymen. Selma Lagerlöf, who was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1858, is the Swedish idol in literature. Yet she is a woman who aspires to no prominence. She is modest, retiring, and unconscious of self.
Catt presided and addresses were made by Miss Westermarck, Dr. Augspurg, Mrs. Snowden, Miss Schwimmer, Dr. Shaw and Sweden's best beloved Selma Lagerlöf. The last named moved the audience to tears during her address on Home and State by her impassioned plea for the enfranchisement of women.
Women may vote for town and county councils, which elect the Upper House of Parliament, and thirty-seven are serving on these councils." She referred eloquently to the honored Selma Lagerlöf and to Dr. Lydia Wahlstrom, the recent president of the National Suffrage Association, who had been crowned with a laurel wreath for her wisdom by the University of Upsala.
The speech made so great an impression that we had it translated and distributed among the Swedes of the United States wherever we held meetings in Swedish localities. Miss Lagerlof interested me extremely, and I was delighted by an invitation to breakfast with her one morning.
Miss Lagerlöf has not been without her share of life's perplexities and of contact with her fellowmen, it is by intuition that she works rather than by experience. Otherwise, she could not have depicted in her books such a multitude of characters from all parts of Europe. She sees character with woman's warm and delicate sympathy and with the clear vision of childhood.
Her latest book, Jerusalem, is one of extraordinary fascination, created quite a sensation in Sweden, and places Selma Lagerlöf quite among the foremost writers of the day. It may in general be said of Swedish writers that they have a high idea of their calling. Few, if any, have accepted as their sole function the idealization of form.
The novel is opened by that favourite device of Selma Lagerlöf, the monologue, through which she pries into the very soul of her characters, in this case Ingmar, son of Ingmar, of Ingmar Farm. Ingmar's monologue at the plow is a subtle portrayal of an heroic battle between the forces of conscience and desire.
From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby. Women's Intelligence
She is a fearless and unfailing champion of free thought, individualism, and woman's emancipation. As was said of Madame de Staël, her writings are "the most masculine productions of the faculties of woman." Selma Lagerlöf occupies as a novelist a position of her own. Her style and her manner in fiction are unique.
No other Swedish writer of any period has so faithfully mirrored the soul of the Swedish people as has Selma Lagerlöf, nor has any other writer been so worshipped by her people. In her native province her work has sunk deep into the hearts of the people.
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