Gender and Nation as Symbolic Challenge: The British Reception of Swedish Playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler’s True Women

Abstract

Women writers from the peripheries and semiperipheries of Europe who participated in the metropolitan melting pots of new ideas at the fin de siècle are often marginalized or excluded in historiographical accounts, making their contributions to a European cultural heritage invisible.1 This marginalization, shared by numerous women playwrights and artists, prompts the need to explore ways of providing a fair account of their contributions. Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849–92) was one of these women who set out on a European journey to try her luck with an international career. In this essay I explore her contribution to the late nineteenth-century London avant-garde with her play Sanna kvinnor (1883) [True Women, 1892].2 The application of any quantitative method, or those that rely solely on the translation, staging, publication, and reviews of actual plays, would likely obscure rather than illuminate the reception of her work. To contextualize the reception of Leffler’s play, it is necessary to adopt a theoretical perspective that integrates the political and the artistic, while also considering Leffler’s status as a foreign playwright in Britain. Furthermore, the pattern of reception requires theoretical conceptualization and evaluation in line with the social and cultural position of women at the time. In the case of Leffler, this conceptualization should consider the reception of her embodiment of the New Woman together with her contribution to theatre as part of the endeavors of a personal network marked by blurred boundaries between the private and the public, as well as between life, politics, and art.3