We Women and Our Authors — Story, Setting & Ideas

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In Category - Historical Psychological Social Fiction

Authors: Marholm, Laura, 1854-1928, Ramsden, Hermione Charlotte, 1867-1951 [Translator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2022 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in literature Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 56,039

Reading time 244 min

Text sections 5

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #67577

Laura Marholm examines how male authors like Ibsen, Björnson, and Tolstoy portray women, arguing that their literary depictions shape and limit female self-understanding. The book combines literary criticism with social observation, tracing women's struggle for individuality against the backdrop of late 19th-century European culture.

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istence--the rich stream of her life--was beginning to be drained, man no longer wanted it, he asked for nothing better than to be quite free of her. She had become a torment to him.

There is yet another generation which consists of quite young girls, and the latest school of so-called “authors,” viz., our young naturalists.

They are there, no doubt. But these young people are the last to have any idea as to how they are to treat women!

Naturalism, as through a slight misunderstanding it is generally called, is the point of view taken by the Philistine in literature. In Germany it is through naturalism especially that the bourgeois spirit tries to become literary. These “authors” seem to say: “We cannot afford to waste anything, we have no superfluities, and we must do our best to succeed. Neither can we afford to give, we would sooner accept from others. For Heaven’s sake leave us in peace with your problems, and with the woman-problem in particular. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as a woman-problem, there are washer-women, and there are Christian mothers, and of course there are family quarrels and hereditary peculiarities, just as there are free unions which end badly. Once we saw a girl student who fell in love--but in quite a sisterly fashion--with a book, and therefore we have the right to maintain that we understand women. We also knew a socialist who married a baron after having presided for many years over a mantle warehouse. And one of our young girls actually went off on the spot with the very first young man whose acquaintance she made; but it did very well on the stage. We describe life exactly as we understand it, and everything that we do not understand is false and fantastical. Women are a useful institution as wives and readers, but in other ways they are as useless and insignificant as ourselves.”

Authors are the most conspicuous feature of any given period. When they are not great precursors, they are like the little house-masters of a school--a rather more presentable example of the whole class whom they affect to despise.

What the little house-masters despise most is the populace. But then Tolstoy and Strindberg despise it also--the former the Christians, the latter the Atheists. Ours, which is the plebeian age _par préférence_, makes the same enquiry about everything that is brought under its notice: “Of what use is it to me?” And even the women are judged from this point of view.

The man of this weary, utilitarian age is half a decadent and half a barbarian. What does he want with the superior woman? Nothing, of course. She is merely an annoyance to him, a burden. If he is enterprising, he marries a well-filled purse; if he has an affectionate disposition, he marries a wife of his own class. The more cultured, more highly developed women are thrust on one side, nay more, they are starved. They have a gnawing at the heart, a rankling distrust of happiness, of love, and of men in particular. They are driven to seek for consolation in their mutual affection for one another, and they refuse to have anything more to do with men.

This is the phenomenon which Maupassant, with the unfeigned astonishment of a full-blooded man, has described in _Notre Cœur_. His is the _fin de siècle_ woman whose whole being has become unproductive, her intellect, her grace, her gentle nature, and even her powers of affection. Man is no longer there for her soul and her senses! She is self-sufficient.

There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last half of the present century--how she developed in the struggle to compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of personal independence--how she became free and became her own master, and won for herself a place in the history of her time--how she escaped from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether--that is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the cause of much suffering.

A portion of these confessions have been collected by me in my book called _Modern Women_.

_Gottfried Keller and Women_

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Laura Marholm’s We Women and Our Authors opens with a direct challenge: German women, she writes, have long seen themselves as “an appendage to or a part of man.” The sentence sets the tone for a work that is part literary criticism, part social diagnosis. Marholm does not merely summarize plots; she interrogates the assumptions behind male-authored portraits of women, asking what those portraits reveal about the authors—and what they conceal about women themselves. The book’s structure, moving from Gottfried Keller to Maupassant and Barbey d’Aurevilly, mirrors a progression in European literature’s treatment of female desire and independence. Marholm’s own voice is urgent, sometimes caustic, and she does not hesitate to call out what she sees as hypocrisy or evasion in celebrated writers.

A Voice That Refuses to Be an Appendage

Marholm’s prose is marked by a distinctive rhetorical strategy: she frequently poses questions that her male subjects have avoided. “Who am I? and not: Whose am I?” she writes, condensing a generation’s shift in self-perception into a single contrast. The phrasing is pointed, almost aphoristic, and it recurs in various forms throughout the opening chapter. She does not adopt the detached tone of a scholarly survey; instead, she writes as a woman addressing other women, using “we” and “our” to create a sense of shared experience. This collective voice is not merely stylistic—it signals her argument that women’s self-understanding is still nascent, “helpless beginners filled with desires, needs and claims, which they themselves do not understand.” The language is precise: women are not yet fully conscious of their own longings, and Marholm’s task is to bring those longings into the open.

Björnson and the Politics of Proximity

In the chapter on Björnson, Marholm shifts from general diagnosis to a specific case study. She recounts a journey through Norway, where a peasant driver points out Björnson’s home and explains why the author is beloved: he is a “homely man” who goes “straight ahead.” The anecdote is not decorative; it grounds Marholm’s analysis of Björnson’s influence in concrete social relations. She contrasts the peasantry’s “healthy strength” with the “decadence of the middle classes,” a term she uses without irony. The middle class, she argues, is characterized by “narrow horizon,” “commercial self-satisfaction,” and “snivelling morality”—a list that echoes Ibsen’s own indictments. Yet Marholm is careful to distinguish between authors: Ibsen, the “revolutionary bourgeois,” wields a “scorpion whip,” while Björnson, the peasant’s son, preaches reform but still sees middle-class life as “the highest normal condition.” The distinction is subtle but crucial to her argument about how male authors limit women’s possibilities even when they seem to champion them.

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: A Diagnosis Without Cure

Marholm’s treatment of Ibsen is among the most incisive in the book. She focuses on Hedda Gabler, reading the play not as a tragedy of a misunderstood woman but as a clinical dissection of a “sexless nonentity.” Her language is deliberately harsh: Hedda “stupidly sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring” and retains “nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire.” The analysis is grounded in Ibsen’s own details—the officer father, the upper-commercial-class milieu—but Marholm pushes further, arguing that Ibsen’s method is to “take her and throw her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on her lips.” The phrase “æsthetic formula” is key: Marholm suggests that Ibsen, for all his insight, ultimately reduces Hedda to a symbol, a case study that confirms his own worldview rather than opening up new possibilities for women. The critique is not that Ibsen is wrong, but that his vision is incomplete—a diagnosis without a prescription.

Marholm’s book is best read as a series of provocations rather than a systematic treatise. She expects her reader to be familiar with the works she discusses, but she does not simply explicate them; she argues with them. The most rewarding approach is to track her recurring concerns—the tension between economic independence and emotional fulfillment, the way literary form can both reveal and conceal, the difficulty of speaking as a woman in a critical tradition dominated by men. Her own voice, sharp and engaged, offers a model for that struggle.

That rainy afternoon, Marholm’s insistence that male authors hand women their own reflections left me restless. I set her down and wandered, half-accidentally, into an old biographical discourse. Its quiet attention to a forgotten man’s character felt like a mirror turned away—a relief. There, too, was the same struggle for individuality, but without the weight of borrowed voices. A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck Delivered before the New-York Historical Society, May 17th, 1870 — Background and Themes became my afternoon’s second companion, and I wondered if every book is a waiting door.