22/03/2024

Victoria Benedictsson, Ernst Ahlgren, Miss Julie

 





Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

 

Sunday 22 July 1888 was a glorious day in Copenhagen, warm and sunny. The city was celebrating an outdoor exhibition of the latest architectural ideas, thousands of people had filled the narrow cobblestone streets, all sweaty and waving the Danish red-and-white flag. The world seemed as beautiful as the future was promising. But for the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson neither the world, nor the future, registered any more. She had rented a small room in the Leopold Hotel, just by Kongens Nytorv, and bought herself a razor knife and a handheld mirror. She’d spent the previous evening writing goodbye letters, then waited for the unbearably slow flow of time to pass midnight. Only then, with the mirror in one hand and the knife in the other, she cut her own throat. The hotel maid found her body in the morning.

Details of Benedictsson’s death detonated through the Nordic cultural bourgeoisie. The air was full of fragments of her life; one knew this, and the other that. Famous friends published obituaries in the Scandinavian newspapers, and her portrait was on display in bookstore windows. Speculations as to the cause of her death crossed each other like arrows of gossip. Bad finances was one theory, unhappy love another. In the scandalous newspaper Aftenbladet, the owner of the Leopold Hotel declared that Mrs Benedictsson was undeniably tense and hysterical. There were two beings in her, he claimed, that fought each other: her father had cultivated a wildness in her nature, while her mother taught her only to pray.

Meanwhile, her friend August Strindberg was almost starving. His marriage to Siri von Essen was falling apart, and he lacked a home as well as a steady income after having sunk himself in scandal with his sexually explicit essays. Accused and tried for blasphemy, he’d fled Sweden. Now, exonerated from the charges, he had a hard time finding publishers. He feared for his state of mind, but no one seemed to want him, not even the psychiatrists he consulted.

Strindberg and Benedictsson had become friends in Copenhagen. At first, Strindberg had reluctantly admired her, but when she turned out to be more successful than him (only the fourth woman ever to receive a sizeable grant from the Swedish Academy), his friendliness turned into fierce envy. As soon as he heard about her suicide, he began writing the play of his life, out of, as one friend put it, ‘an unrelenting and cruel cannibalism without the slightest hint of compassion’.

She was born Victoria Maria Bruzelius in the south of Sweden in 1850, at a time when women lacked human rights and the Western world was undergoing relentless change – a time Friedrich Nietzsche later compressed into three words: ‘God is dead.’ With industrialisation came capitalism. The creation of banks and factories followed, amid the birth pangs of communism and liberalism, constantly fighting over people’s minds. As The Communist Manifesto (1848) states with poetic clear sight:

    “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”

Frightening times – and strangely polarising, for, if God is dead, what takes God’s place? Science, research, rationality, some answered triumphantly. Loneliness and rootlessness, said others. Or, immorality and capitalism. God is dead, long live modernity!

 


 

 

Victoria grew up in a village so small one could blink and miss it on passing though. Her parents were well educated but lacked money. On top of that, they were old. An awkward, lonely child, her mother taught her most of the skills a girl of the bourgeoisie had to know – French, piano, sewing, embroidery – plus all there was to know about God’s truth and punishment. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to be the king of freedom. The two of them would ride over the open fields and he’d teach her to wrestle, whistle and shoot. Galloping to keep up, Victoria duly wrestled, whistled and shot, doing her best to be the son her father longed for.

For a time, both were happy, before a singular moment when everything changed. The sensitive young girl watched her father realise – she literally saw it happen – that, indeed, she was not a son. She registered the change of expression in his eyes and interpreted it as rejection and contempt. From that moment, she not only hated being a girl, she despised the characteristics within herself that she identified as feminine, and couldn’t stand women in general.

She grew tall (183 centimetres, or just over 6 feet) and strongwilled, determined to be a painter. Twice she asked for her father’s permission to study art and was twice denied. The second rejection broke her down. Now 20, she deplored the options ahead of her: working as a governess or staying at home as an unmarried daughter. So, when an old suitor turned up – Christian Benedictsson, 30 years her senior, a widower and father of five – she married him. With a postmaster for a husband, she saw opportunity; being a married woman would grant her a certain amount of freedom. Yet it took just months for her to realise that she’d merely exchanged one dependency for another. Later, she described the marital institution as state-sanctioned prostitution; her husband was obliged to support her for the rest of her life, while she, in turn, was obliged to provide her body.





Victoria Benedictsson proved an excellent stepmother, but when she had a daughter of her own, there was no affection. The baby girl was the fruit of an old man’s lust. When she became pregnant a second time, a dark mood took hold of her; for several weeks of the pregnancy, she wouldn’t eat. Born on 22 July 1876, her daughter was christened, named Ellen, then died. Benedictsson’s diary notes at the time went silent. But there are clues to her state of mind, to the guilt and relief that consumed her. From that time on, she identified with Lady Macbeth, a woman who had committed the worst of crimes.

Benedictsson’s private notes were often made in a cipher of her own invention, to ward off prying eyes. They reveal that village life bored her. That she found people narrowminded, unintelligent and gossipy. In secret, she started to write short stories inspired by Charles Dickens, sending them to newspapers under male pen-names. Although rejected, she received good advice along the way: study your surroundings, young man. Get to know your world and the people in it.

Skåne was her landscape: the windy fields, muddy village streets and forest groves where lily-of-the-valley grows and where people go hunting for rooks, those metallic black birds that obscure the sky when they take off in flocks. In response to a world transforming at steam-engine speed, people were nostalgic for premodern society: the countryside untouched by time, which they perceived as authentic (much like now). Benedictsson’s short stories about the people of Skåne and their ways, published under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren, were an immediate hit. ‘Ahlgren is the future and hope of Swedish literature,’ the critics cried, not knowing that Ahlgren was a 33-year-old married woman with six children. An unexpected star was born.

For much of the 1880s, Scandinavia was engaged in a heated cross-border literary debate about male and female sexuality, power and subordination, set off by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) – and fuelled by the book The Elements of Social Science (1861) by the British doctor George Drysdale. Ibsen questioned the gilded cage of bourgeoise women, lacking all rights but the one to please others, while Drysdale argued that men’s and women’s genitals were muscles that needed regular exercise in order not to atrophy.

 Scandinavian intellectuals began asking if women should be allowed to have sex before marriage, learn about their bodies, masturbate? Should men stay chaste until their wedding night, or would they die if their urges were held back? (A thesis that Strindberg supported, by the way.) At the centre of it all stood the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, the man whom Benedictsson would come to love in the last two years of her life. He’d risen to fame translating John Stuart Mills’s The Subjection of Women (1869), to which he added a preface, pleading between the lines for women’s erotic rights, as a complement to Mills’s advocacy of women’s economical, legal and social rights. Brandes’s translation swept like a firestorm through Scandinavia, as tens of thousands of women found in it words for describing their predicament. He became their unofficial leader, and a role model for working-class reformers and students who yearned for a less rigid society.




Brandes became the most important critic in northern Europe. He introduced Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the Nordic countries and discovered Nietzsche. (As proof of his central position in European culture, Brandes’s daughter kept a ‘friend book’ where admirers left greetings. There are signatures by Otto von Bismarck, Maurice Ravel, Claude Monet, Albert Einstein, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Igor Stravinsky, Leo Tolstoy, H G Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. Sigmund Freud personally sent his book on dream interpretation to Brandes.)

During Benedictsson’s lonely years of writing in the attic of the postmaster’s house, she read every word Brandes wrote. He was a beacon of light in the intellectual backwaters of the Swedish countryside – a guide to the higher education she coveted, but was denied because of her gender. ‘I have a man’s brain in a woman’s body,’ she noted.

When she published her first novel, Money (1885), she found instant celebrity, never mind that a jealous neighbour denounced her, revealing her true identity to the press. Having gained confidence and prestige as Ernst Ahlgren, she decided to transform herself into him altogether. After all, Ahlgren wasn’t obliged to kiss Postmaster Benedictsson. Ahlgren could sit up all night smoking, eating grapes and discussing literature with his newfound literary friends.





Benedictsson’s transformation wasn’t so much about becoming a man, as becoming free. Like a female Houdini, she started breaking out of the corseted cage of womanhood: the stepchildren could take care of themselves, her young daughter was left to her grandmother. The old postmaster found himself forced into a deal he didn’t want: freed from the obligation to support her, he lost his right to have sex with her. Finally, the village where they lived, with all its small-town busybodies, was so sharply dissected in a short story by Ahlgren, that the male villagers clubbed together to threaten her with physical violence. Step by step, the old ties were cut. Victoria became Ernst. She – or he – set off to Stockholm and was celebrated by the cultural elite. Unusually tall, dark-haired and always dressed in black silk, maybe to conceal the fact that she hardly had any money to keep up with fashion, Ahlgren even flirted. At 35, she discovered what turned her on; only the intellectual connection between equal minds awoke her sensuality.

Ahlgren seems to have moved back and forth along the gender line seamlessly. Her male friends called her ‘brother Ernst’ and she frequently signed her letters with the cross-gender ‘mother Ernst’. One friend described her as:

   “… a woman without anything on the outside revealing what goes on inside. He takes pride in hiding it and the whole world thinks Mrs Benedictsson is a lovely person. But to himself, Ernst Ahlgren laughs at them all – and portrays them in his books.”

Note the fluid pronouns. But Stockholm ultimately proved to be as petty bourgeois as Benedictsson’s home village. She was free, but incredibly lonely. In a bid to find others as ‘free and wild’ as herself, she left for Copenhagen, hometown of Brandes.

In October 1886, Ahlgren invited Brandes to her room at the Leopold Hotel and, politely, he came to visit. He had heard of her, after all, and knew that they shared literary ideals. They discussed literature, the current debate on sexuality and marriage; he confided in her about his mistresses and marriage. She proved a good listener. He told her he liked her. Imagine that! The postmaster’s wife had turned herself into a progressive, celebrated writer, and was now in an intimate, face-to-face conversation with her idol. She tried to stay cool but fell in love. As soon as Brandes left, she jotted down every word and every pause, like sheet music. All must be documented. They soon met again. Then they kissed.

Her private notes, which had consisted of quotes, outbursts of anger or joy, or anecdotes to use in her writing, now shifted into the purest autofiction, before the genre was coined. Narrating in the past tense, with pace and with structure, she tells the story of a great man who comes to visit an intelligent woman in a hotel room. They talk, they kiss and then something more happens. Ahlgren fell in love, to be sure. But it’s equally true that she was in search of working material. She saw herself as an eater of other peoples’ lives, and she had stumbled upon a treasure. Meeting by meeting, she created a story about manipulation and subordination, about sexuality, hatred, lust and fear. She extracted every ounce of their relationship, and turned it into literature. Karl Over Knausgård couldn’t have done it better.

One painful twist to the story appeared early on. The very reason their meeting took place was that Ahlgren had made it as an author, and Brandes was curious. But while she’d found success by breaking out of the gender cage, it became apparent that Brandes hadn’t the slightest interest in a woman who had dismantled her femininity. To keep his attention, she must turn herself back into a woman. She cursed herself for betraying herself, nevertheless she changed her hair to please him, and stayed in her room just in case he might show up. She also started keeping a record of his friends and mistresses, then tried to befriend them. Was she a woman in love? A writer who used herself to make art? An intellectual stalker? The answer to all these questions is yes.

 After almost a year of talking and kissing, Brandes seemed to lose interest. He had repeatedly asked for sex – he would never seduce her, he said, he wanted sex only if she wanted it just as much – but she’d declined. Now, she panicked and offered him the last thing she had left to give, or so she saw it. They had sex a couple of times, and then he truly lost interest. Still the real blow came when her second novel was published and he called it a ‘ladies-book’. Ahlgren, whose mark of pride lay in writing matter-of-factly and without sentiment, ‘like a man’, was devastated. On top of that, Brandes’s brother Edvard, unaware of their relationship, slaughtered the book in a review in the daily Politiken. Now, it all stood clear to Benedictsson. She wasn’t enough of a woman to be loved by Georg Brandes, nor a good enough artist to be respected by him. She sought out her father’s revolver and made sure it worked.

Meanwhile, Strindberg watched her closely. They both stayed for extended periods at the Leopold Hotel, shared friends, and spent time together. He was intrigued by her, unsure what kind of creature she really was. A woman? No. But not a man either.





Ahlgren dismissed the idea of suicide by gun, worrying that she’d only end up hurt, not dead. Instead, she got a hold of morphine. She informed a close friend of her plans and asked him to be there, as she waited for death. Not surprisingly, the poor bloke couldn’t handle the situation, so he knocked on Strindberg’s door and told him of the goings-on down the hotel corridor. Strindberg was suddenly wide awake and intensely curious. It turned out that Benedictsson threw up and, this time, failed to die. Condemned to survive, she took off for Paris, visited friends, even published a book of short stories (which Brandes quite liked). She also had a huge success with a play in Stockholm, but nothing seemed to help. In the summer of 1888, she booked a room at the Leopold once more, bought a razor and a handheld mirror, and patiently awaited 22 July – the birthday of her baby girl who died – turning it into the last day of her life. Strindberg immediately got down to work on the play Miss Julie:

“ Someone commits suicide. ‘Business worries,’ says the business man. ‘Unrequited love,’ say the ladies. ‘Physical illness,’ says the sick man. ‘Shattered hopes,’ says the failure. But it may well be that the motive lay in all of these things, or in none of them, and that the dead man concealed his real motive by emphasising quite a different one that shed the best possible light on his memory.”

In his play, Strindberg underlines the upbringing of the drama’s unfortunate female protagonist, raised as a boy and thus become half-woman, half-man. The emancipated woman, he continues, is not a ‘good species’ but must self-destroy. Subsequently, he indicates a suicide by the female lead – with a razor. Just 19 days after Benedictsson’s death, Strindberg sent the finished manuscript to his publisher. The dead Victoria Benedictsson had become Miss Julie.

Beyond the fact that he stole Benedictsson’s gender-ambivalent childhood, the combination of both sexes in her grown-up identity, and the details of her gruesome suicide, she doesn’t seem at first glance to have much in common with the fictional Miss Julie. The protagonist of Miss Julie is an upper-class woman who manipulates the valet Jean into sex, and then takes her own life. Nevertheless, the core of Strindberg’s drama, and of both the real and the fictional woman’s fate, is the lifelong struggle between strength and weakness that inevitably leads to her downfall.

 


Benedictsson would probably have approved, even applauded Strindberg’s theft. After all, she’d trained herself to become an almost scientific consumer of other people’s fates. She admired an objective eye, and always tried to ‘dissect’ her feelings and thoughts in order to become a better writer. This was the creed of modernity. Artists were to stay true to reality and shun the sentimental or false, according to its leading apostles – Ibsen and Brandes. But, above all, Benedictsson had fed on her own fate like the ouroboros forever swallowing its own tail. Over the last two years of her life, her diary transformed into the novel of her life as she was living it, with a delay of only a few days.

The hatred and euphoria she experienced transformed into text so fresh it steamed like the meat of a recently slaughtered animal, as she herself put it. This was literature quite inappropriate for a woman to express, and unthinkable to publish at the time. Only by leaving it to a male friend, who published it in portions over the next 30 years, would it become a bestseller, as forceful as Strindberg’s novel The Defence of a Fool (1893) would be. Only Benedictsson’s fool was a woman – her own being, her curse and her prison. Taking her own life was the final escape.

The real Miss Julie. By Elisabeth Åsbrink. Aeon, March 14, 2024. 






At the time of her death, in 1888, Victoria Benedictsson was a celebrated author. She was the first of the literary group ‘Det unga Sverige’ (Young Sweden) to receive a grant from the Swedish Academy. This signified her having been admitted to the cultural establishment that she had for so long believed herself to be excluded from as a woman and “a pariah, a mangy dog”. Before Victoria Benedictsson settled on the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren, she had long vacillated between the alternatives ‘Tardif’, the tardy, and ‘O. Twist’, the unwelcome. To Victoria Benedictsson, writing is just as symbolically loaded as her choice of a signature appears to be; it is an analysis of the problems associated with female identity, with being a gender and not a human being. “I am a woman. But I am an author – am I not, then, something of a man as well?” she wonders in January 1888.

Her own life was short and ended tragically. Thirty-eight years old, she took her life in a hotel room in Copenhagen. For a period of a few years in the middle of the 1880s she was astonishingly productive. Her career as an author falls between 1884 and 1888, in which period she published two novels and two collections of short stories as well as several plays and newspaper articles. Simultaneously, she kept an extensive diary and corresponded energetically with many of her colleagues. Her intellectual vitality during this short period stands in contrast to the image of a sickly, doomed person, which has dominated her posthumous reputation.

In the last part of her life, Victoria Benedictsson worked as though possessed on many different literary drafts. In her diary she exclaims: “I want to write about women. And if – after having written the most daring and honest things I know – I still feel as I do now, then I want to die.” Common to these texts is that they deal exclusively with the relationship between the sexes, and especially with the woman’s possibilities for both self-realisation and love.

 

The Voice From The Dark

Victoria Benedictsson’s extensive literary estate includes a number of drafts that are of great interest both as regards their plots and their aesthetics. The female figures are driven towards disaster, while the style becomes increasingly modern in its pitch black, piercing brevity. Was Victoria Benedictsson’s last insight that the woman can only be described as a tragic subject? The posthumously published prose piece “Ur mörkret” (Eng. tr. From the Darkness) is conceived as a confession. The situation is surprisingly similar to a psychoanalysis, with a male analyst listening to a female patient stretched out on the couch. According to Freud, who around the same time developed his method with the aid of middle-class Viennese women, the role of the analyst is to try to render meaning and coherence to the patient’s fragmented life story. Axel Lundegård, the colleague and friend who ‘inherited’ Victoria Benedictsson’s unpublished manuscript, took that role upon himself when he reconstructed “Ur mörkret” on the basis of the various drafts that existed at the time of her death.

The bitter, languishing Nina of the story confides her wasted woman’s life to a silently listening male friend. “Everything is shameful for a woman because she is nothing in herself; she is only part of her sex.” Nina can be seen as a double victim of the patriarchal ideology that Victoria Benedictsson compliantly noted down after having listened captivated to Georg Brandes lecturing on the different natures of man and woman, in Copenhagen in the winter of 1886:

       “A real man primarily possesses power, power in everything he does, power to bend others to fit into his plans, and to use them as tools, power to hold a woman fast!

“And what is ‘the womanly’? The ability to love completely and without conventional considerations: warmly, fully, vigorously. To be brave, sacrificing, strong; everything through love, without jealousy, without any ulterior motive; simply because it is her nature to love.”

The Nina figure is provided with a history that confirms the fact that this ideology is very much in force. She has been exposed in turn to the contempt of her father, her husband, and her lover, and she turns their misogyny both inwards, towards herself, and outwards, towards other women. A modern reader might easily interpret “Ur mörkret” as a paradigmatic account of a typical woman’s lot in the shadow of the patriarchy. But that is not an exhaustive reading. The story is in fact full of contradictions in its investigation of the inner logic of the patriarchal ideology. It turns out to be Nina, and not the men in her life, who possesses the ‘male’ virtues of competence, industry, veracity, and honesty, and this makes the text ambiguous and ambivalent. The insight of the text is greater than that of the plaintive Nina.




In her self-analysis, Nina appears a prisoner of ideology, crushed between the inherent polarities of language: masculinity = good, “everything”; and femininity = bad, “nothing”. In despair she searches, in her language, for a third, utopian alternative, “neither man nor woman, merely a living being”. This construct recurs almost obsessively throughout the story. But to reside in a “merely” – to be a neuter – is an impossibility. All that remains for the woman who does not want to be ‘woman’ and cannot be ‘man’, which is the highly desired condition, is, with a triple negation, a “watered-down, bloodless nothingness”. And this is where Nina finds herself during her long confession. Her body on the couch is literally devoured by a “nothingness”, a “hollow-eyed” darkness, out of which her monotone and tormented voice is heard.

But from this empty position, a resistance is built up, against all odds, when Nina insists on absence. Her refusal to be a woman in the sense of being an object for the man makes her an anti-subject, a “merely”, an empty form to reside in. And gradually the darkness turns out to be the real protagonist of the story, the site of the unconscious, the enigmatic, the utopian, the very hollowness of the language. “Ur mörkret” can be read as Victoria Benedictsson’s literary testament.

Nina’s self-understanding in Victoria Benedictsson’s novel “Ur mörkret” (1888; Eng. tr. From the Dark):

“I had learned to see with my father’s eyes; I saw from a man’s point of view what it means to be a woman – repulsive, repulsive, one great misfortune from our very birth! I felt like a mangy dog. This is when the humility emerged that is my character’s brand and incurable flaw. Oh, the spot in my brain! How soft and sensitive it grew so that each barb could penetrate! How much I understood when it came to this single thing: to comprehend something that was as incomprehensible to other women as the twittering of the birds.”

Two years earlier, she had proudly and full of contempt dissociated herself from what she saw as Alfhild Agrell’s “hollow”, “dreary”, and “sickly affected pessimism”, in order to write instead “so that people get happier and better from reading”. If this were to fail, it would be better, Victoria Benedictsson thought, not to write at all. It may seem as if she, with “Ur mörkret”, had ended up in an aesthetic impasse. And then again! The fact that she did not destroy the manuscript fragments indicates that she had a feeling that it was this kind of contradictory literary texts, which defied unambiguous interpretations, that would ensure her a place in literary history.

The first scholar to take Victoria Benedictsson seriously as a female artist is Jette Lundbo Levy. She sheds light on Benedictsson’s grandiose attempt at presenting a third point of view, distinct from the men’s message of free love, but also from the women’s movement’s puritan reply to this message (with the demand that, before marriage, men had to be just as sexually inexperienced, just as ‘pure’, as women). Lundbo Levy reads Benedictsson at several different levels, compares her private diary entries and letters with published material, and asks herself why Benedictsson did not entirely succeed in describing, in an elaborated literary form, her complex feelings with regard to the dilemma of femininity. What determines Benedictsson’s writing is rather what Lundbo Levy calls “the aesthetics of the double gaze”, the tension between a ‘male’ gaze that creates one literary form and a ‘female’ gaze that creates another. “Ur mörkret” (Eng. tr. From the Dark) is a clear example of this aesthetics and its inherent tension.

The Programme

Victoria Benedictsson’s conscious aesthetics embraces three different writing projects. Firstly, she wanted to write for ordinary people, “for those who work”. Secondly, she wanted to “submit problems to debate”, and, as Georg Brandes advocated, present the great contemporary questions in a realistic, engaged prose. And thirdly, she wanted to describe her own inner development, her ever more trying struggle to make the woman, the human being, and the author hang together. She made her debut as an author in 1884 with the favourably received collection of short stories Från Skåne (From Scania) by ‘Ernst Ahlgren’. In addition to romantic stories about being an artist and being the chosen one, the collection includes a number of descriptions of the lives of common people, with sharply drawn portraits of people from the Swedish province of Scania. In varying ways, the Danish-Norwegian Magdalene Thoresen, the Dane Henrik Pontoppidan, and the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had already created a tradition of portraying ‘the people’, but Victoria Benedictsson renews the genre by focusing instead on the observer. She lets traditional patterns of life be reflected in the eyes of an outsider, and her sense of humour shoots down every attempt at idyllising. Instead, it is the repetition, the stagnation, and the sluggishness that dominate in her description of country life. A recurring image is the clay that clings to the wooden shoes, holding you back and making your gait heavy and clumsy. “– The road is one big puddle, and the feet get stuck in the clayey soil, which is so sticky that it ties you down […].”

The soil ties you down and holds you back. The feelings of security and homeliness easily turn into the feeling of being cooped up. This was what Victoria Benedictsson increasingly experienced in her own life. Gradually, the life as the wife of a postmaster in an ill-matched marriage in the small community of Hörby became too restricted for her; she longed for wider horizons, new contacts and impulses. The newly opened railway made it easier for the author, who had a bad leg, to travel to Stockholm, Malmö, or Copenhagen. And she grasped the opportunity.

A part of her luggage was her unique literary friendship with the writer Axel Lundegård, ten years her junior, whom she had met at the home of his parents in Hörby. “Complete openness!” was the watchword between the two colleagues, who read each other’s manuscripts and offered each other criticism and praise. It was an unusual, intense, but by no means conflict-free friendship that developed. In their correspondence, which grew extensive in the autumn of 1884, they discussed the craft of writing and the ideas of the time. Both understand that unprejudiced communication with someone of the opposite sex is important, but to Victoria Benedictsson it was invaluable. She writes to Axel Lundegård:

     “This is what interests me most in the world: the equality of the sexes, not only in a social context but first and foremost in their own consciousness, for that is what matters. And now I’ve come to something in your letter: ‘If we are to benefit at all from our knowing each other, we have to talk about everything without reservation.’ Yes, yes, yes! There’s nothing I want more than that. Haven’t I, ever since I was a child, been waiting for these words, and no one has said them to me until now!”

The possibilities offered by the period’s patriarchal marriage for “equality of the sexes” is what she examined in the two novels she completed.

Less on account of her writing than of her personal fate, Victoria Benedictsson has become the female fixed star in the literary sky of the Swedish 1880s. As such, she often eclipsed the period’s other female authors. However, it is the image of tragic femininity that emerges in literary history, a frigid, plain, and strained heroic figure, who committed suicide as a result of unrequited love.

This interpretation is based on the comprehensive biographical source material formed by the handwritten volumes of Stora boken (The Big Book). Select parts of this unequalled ‘self-confession’ were published, under the name of the editor, Fredrik Böök, as the ‘love novel’ Victoria Benedictsson och Georg Brandes (1948; Victoria Benedictsson and Georg Brandes). That book has fixed the image of Victoria Benedictsson as the tragic heroine of the 1880s, a mixture of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. She is, in fact, considered to be the model for both these characters.

 To this should be added that, in contrast to most of her contemporary female colleagues, Victoria Benedictsson adopted a rather humble attitude with regard to the question of the relationship between man and woman. In a letter of 1886, she confides the following theory to her friend Ellen Key:

“If men want to regard us as small, clever pals, then we should be pleased, for this is, I believe, nature’s intent. That a few women – one or two in each century – rise above the crowd, does not change anything for all the rest of us average human beings.”

 

The (Im)possibility Of Marriage

The novel Pengar (1885; Eng. tr. Money) opens with young Selma being persuaded to ‘sell’ herself to the rich country squire Kristersson. Their intimate life is a torment that soon makes her realise that marriage without love and companionship is not much better than prostitution. Unlike the protagonist of Amalie Skram’s novel Constance Ring (Constance Ring), which appeared in the same year, Selma succeeds in breaking out of her marriage. Pengar is a typical novel of the 1880s, a well-written plea against early marriage and marriages of convenience, but above all against the sexual ignorance that was considered the young middle-class girl’s finest dowry. Victoria Benedictsson does not shy away from describing the sexual life of the spouses. The wedding night is experienced as a rape, and the tale about King Lindworm, who exacted the promise from his queen that she would never enter his chamber when he is asleep, is woven together with Selma’s thoughts about what is most forbidden. For through her marriage she has had the same experience as the queen, who, defying the prohibition, discovered a coiled, “scaly monster” in the king’s bed: “Now her curiosity was satisfied. But she could never forget that sight, and each time King Lindworm took her in his arms, it was as if he resumed the form of the scaly monster, so slithery and cold that his embrace made her writhe in agony.”




Fru Marianne (1887; Mrs Marianne) was Victoria Benedictsson’s great venture. It was to prove to everybody that she was a great author and not just one among the group of emancipated writing ‘ladies’ who were somewhat looked down upon. But to her great disappointment it was received precisely as a ‘ladies’ novel’. Fru Marianne is, on the surface, a Madame Bovary story with a happy ending. The spoiled middle-class daughter Marianne is purified by her marriage with Börje, the upright son of a farmer; she is put to the test in a “flirtation”, as it is called, with Börje’s best friend, Pål; and she eventually finds her true self in motherhood and marriage.

Marianne’s transformation is illustrated in a dramatic manner: when the novel begins, she lies stretched out on her sofa, indolently reading French novels, “suck[ing] the eroticism of the novels as a child sucks its thumb: if it was not nourishing, at least it offered a kind of consolation”. She is described as a narcissistic sexual being, an object of beauty for men. Three hundred pages later she strides around in rough, striped aprons, energetically occupied in the weaving room and in the vegetable garden. As the mother of a young son, she possesses an insight into herself that is diametrically opposed to the insight she had as a young girl:

 “There would be alternating periods of happiness and sorrow, the serenity of happiness, and hard times. She knew that now. Her life would look like other people’s lives: not romantic or like a fairy tale, but prosaic and ordinary.”

Fru Marianne has been read as a conservative contribution to the ‘morality controversy’ of the 1880s – or as a regressive utopia. The same longing gaze back towards a more meaningful and coherent female life in the country household is found in such varied authors as Selma Lagerlöf, Elin Wägner, Agnes von Krusenstjerna, and Moa Martinson, as well as in the, even nowadays, extremely popular novels set in country houses. However, in Victoria Benedictsson’s time, the most closely related author was August Strindberg who, in the preface to Giftas I (Eng. tr. Getting Married), proclaims the peasant marriage to be an ideal. But any reading that stops there is going to ignore the inner resistance of the novel, Fru Marianne, to its own project. Firstly, the comradely marriage between Marianne and Börje is rather an attempt at a more radical version of Ibsen’s modern, idealistic view of marriage – played out on a realistic and historically relevant backdrop: at the end of the nineteenth century, ninety per cent of Sweden’s population still supported themselves as farmers. Secondly, the character of Pål is crucial, and not only to the plot. In the ‘unconscious’ of the text, his refined, ‘female’ eroticism is a disquieting and triggering element, which aestheticises the writing and casts a double gaze upon the plot, the figures, and the motifs. He is an aspect of Börje, of Marianne, and of the yearning that is the driving force of the text. Pål is the erotic and the aesthetic in one figure, who has to be banned at the level of the plot in order for Benedictsson’s realistic project to be carried out. The reader feels the ambivalence, and it is also reflected in the superficial reception of the novel.

 

A Great Variety Of Women

Despite the fact that Victoria Benedictsson regarded Georg Brandes’s rejection of Fru Marianne as a “death sentence” to her writing, she is very productive in the autumn of 1887. She writes stories about the lives of common people, begins writing the novel Modern (The Mother), and finishes the recently discovered comedy Teorier (Theories).

In Teorier we meet a type of woman who, in line with the message of Fru Marianne, represents an alternative to the middle-class ideal of the young girl. In the 1880s, which the Swedish historian of literature Gunnar Ahlström has so aptly called “the gloomy hey-day of the antimacassars”, Benedictsson’s mouthpiece, the young, spirited Hortense, favours occupations completely different from embroidery, piano-playing, and novel reading. She keeps both feet planted firmly on the ground and does not take any interest in the interminable discussions of morality, but rather in cookery and housekeeping.

The comedy Teorier (Theories), which was never performed in Victoria Benedictsson’s lifetime, may be her attempt at leaving “Some words to my dear daughter” (“Några ord till min kära dotter”). But unlike in Anna Maria Lenngren’s (1754-1817) famous poem bearing this title and written a hundred years earlier, there is only the slightest bit of irony to be found in Teorier. Here, Benedictsson has her young heroine plainly declare that she prefers Hagdahl’s cookery book to Max Nordau’s social analyses.

 


Teorier was performed for the first time in 1988 by Stockholms Studentteater (The Stockholm Student Theatre).

Hortense, Marianne, and Selma are figures that go against the stream of female portraits of a determinist stamp, which are characteristic of the 1880s. Their positive air and the happy endings of the works are important parts of Benedictsson’s ‘programme’. Also in the fragmentary manuscript of the novel Modern, which was completed by Axel Lundegård and published in 1888 in both his and Benedictsson’s name, it is a vigorous and self-confident woman, albeit of an intellectual kind, who is described. In the words of her son, she is “a barbarian woman”, who competes with her son’s dollish-pretty and bland fiancée – and loses. For she cannot bring herself to recognise her own identity conflict in that of the other woman: “She was not able to hear that a lack as deep as her own was hiding in that over-excited laugh.”

There is thus an impressive range of female characters in Victoria Benedictsson’s writings. The woman as a sexual object for the man, “the ennobled animal”, is found at the one extreme, and the dream of the woman as a human being rather than a sexual being at the other. However, she never succeeded in portraying a ‘free’ woman who had full access to both intellect and sexuality. Instead, the future image of the woman can be discerned in the tension between the different types of women, representing different life alternatives. As a female author Victoria Benedictsson invests her own divided self and allows her masochistic self-hatred, which is in constant and violent strife with her equally strong, rebellious ambition, to manifest itself in the texts and develop into characters as incompatible as Mrs Victoria and ‘Ernst’. In her repeated attempts to bridge the two antagonistic views of life, Victoria Benedictsson asks: is it possible to survive as a thinking woman, as a female subject with both head and heart intact?

 

The Bewitched

‘No!’, one is tempted to say upon reading the unfinished prose piece “Den bergtagna” (1888; The Bewitched), written towards the end of Victoria Benedictsson’s life. Concurrently she was working on a play with the same theme, a fragment that was completed by Axel Lundegård and printed in 1890 (Den bergtagna; Eng. tr. The Enchantment). Yet, the manuscript of the play is quite different from the prose version and deals primarily with different ways of handling a love affair and of living with one. In the prose piece, on the other hand, the inherent tragedy of the love affair is described. Step by step, the text records the various stages of the love affair and how the pliant and devoted woman is inevitably entangled in the cunning seducer’s net and driven towards destruction. It is the papers left by a deceased woman that are presented in the frame story, and the note is struck already in the opening words: “I am not defending my life; I am defending my death.”

The bewitched woman’s background is that of an ordinary middle-class Swedish woman, but during a sojourn in Paris she comes into contact with a renowned sculptor, who seduces her. The love affair inspires him to make a new group of sculptures, the completion of which means that she has to make room for a new admiring mistress who is to inspire him to make his next masterpiece. These are conditions that the bewitched woman accepts, with open eyes.

 But the text contains disruptions and questions that are troubling. At a visit to a museum, the Swedish woman is captured by a challenging self-portrait in which a diametrically opposed type of woman makes her entry: an artist who holds her own! As a contrasting picture to this vigorous woman, the reader is offered a glimpse of the bewitched woman, who in this context – in contrast to the previous first-person narrative – is described in the third person. It is a picture seen from a male perspective, and it shows a content sexual object, a happy woman enjoying the approaching summer – but just like the summer, she is doomed. “What radiated from this face was happiness – a quiet and secret, a deep and mysterious happiness, like the sea in which everything can drown, sink, and disappear, while on the surface the sun is shining and all is calm.” The external, male, gaze can depict her in a bright painting. The inner, female, gaze knows that it is impossible for the bewitched woman to be redeemed once she has stepped into the forbidden, free love, which she knows will end with the man abandoning her: “[…] to me neither happiness nor beauty existed, there was only a desolate emptiness, boundless and deep as the sea I was looking at.”

In “Den bergtagna”, the complex and contradictory aspects of femininity are concisely expressed in the central group of sculptures, “Ödet” (Destiny), in which an “enormous female figure with strong limbs” climbs across the “discarded” body of a drowned young woman, who has the features of the bewitched woman. Apparently totally unaffected by the peacefully resting female corpse, the surreal figure gazes “ahead, strongly and coldly – out into the distance, towards an object that is invisible to others”.

The vigorous ‘over-woman’ can be interpreted as a personification of the masculinity that Brandes applauded, an ideal that possessed the “power to bend others to fit into his plans, and to use them as tools”. But the group of sculptures may just as well be seen as a fixed image of the artistic conflict that Victoria Benedictsson struggled with and never managed to solve.

In “Ur mörkret”, the analysis of the masculine principle was taken to its purest and most deadly logical conclusion. The final image in “Den bergtagna” seems to point to something further still and to suggest that this can go on only as long as the feminine principle allows itself to be trampled down.




“‘Free love’ has poisoned my life – love? – what a name for such a thing! I have to die, for I cannot live. But I shall not be hanged in silence. Shame and ignominy shall cling to my death as they have clung to my life, but that shame shall be lifted up on a scaffold, high above the heads of the crowd; there, a pillory shall stand as a warning, and I shall impudently bite my teeth together during the disgrace, for my destruction shall be a blow to the doctrine that you are preaching, the doctrine that I have always loathed, the doctrine I did not dare to stand up against, because you were stronger than I, because you tied me with the tendons that you had drawn out of my own body, because my thought saw clearly, but my physical nature, like a famished assailant, put its hands in front of its eyes in order to steal a crumb or two in the meantime.

“I hate your doctrine, I hate it – hate it! It has nothing to do with free love. Nothing!

“I have known you for a long time. I have no esteem of you – and yet I love you.

 

“I have drunk the mountain troll’s potion; I cannot live among my people. But I want to breathe, breathe, breathe before I die – I want to speak my own language and cry out his name, the name that is going to cost me my life!

“The mountain troll – the mountain king. The king of vice – the great, intoxicating, bewitching king of vice.

“But not a human being.”

From Stora boken III (The Big Book), 14 January 1888.

 




The Diaries

From 1882 until a month before her death in July 1888, Victoria Benedictsson kept a diary, the so-called Stora boken (The Big Book), published in three volumes in 1978-84. Supplemented with calendar notes and correspondence with her closest friends, Axel Lundegård, Ellen Key, Gustaf af Geijerstam, her stepdaughter Matti, and others, it provides an exceptionally rich source of biographical material. The diary can be read as a moral chronicle of the 1880s in the Nordic countries. Benedictsson is adamant that nothing human should be alien to her. Everything that has to do with love or sexuality, with the relationship between the sexes, interests her and is noted down in Stora boken. Often she uses a code in order to be able to inform her “Ernst” or “Old book” about her secret thoughts on abstinence, birth control, syphilis, and prostitution, all the things that women were not supposed to know anything about.

“Good night, old Ernst! I am glad that you are not abandoning me. Sleep well, you sceptical old fogey. You and I, we are some couple! Ernst and Victoria.”

From Stora boken (The Big Book).

 In Stora boken the parties, the gossip, and the scandals of family life in the small town of Hörby are described as well as her encounter with the big city:

 “Stockholm, 5 November 1885. I still feel so terribly lost and a stranger. And then my foot really hurts. But there is something else. My whole being is tormented by a suppressed, brewing hatred. All these people are the enemies of my innermost aspiration. They think of life as a game, and to me it is serious. Everywhere I am met by a haze of lies and falseness; it is as if it is going to choke me, and at the same time my muscles tighten in powerless fury. What are these people rambling on about! Women’s rights, the workers’ cause. Idle talk. Oh, it is all idle talk! […]

“I wish I were in a big city where nobody knew me, where I were thrown out like a small stone and able to hide on the bottom, able to feel life rubbing against me on all sides but not being upset by it, only being shaped, slowly being shaped into something perfect […].”

 A telling example of the difficulty involved in portraying a complex woman is the novel about Lady Macbeth and the artist’s calling that Ellen Key, in her book about her friend, says that Victoria Benedictsson dreamed of writing. Already in 1880, Victoria Benedictsson writes in Stora boken (The Big Book) about her fascination with this female figure, and in 1885 she tells Axel Lundegård that “[e]verything will come to life in my long novel Lady Macbeth, unless I lose my touch or die before then. What a childhood! A goldmine. And what a phenomenal memory I have for facts!”

The strength of her identification with the figure emerges from these lines written a couple of months before her suicide: “I understand Lady Macbeth, for my hand also seems to me to have got a stain that cannot be washed away; it is the feeling that someone else is looking down upon me. I am so proud that I cannot bear that.”

In Victoria Benedictsson’s imagination, Lady Macbeth is the active and proud woman who accepts the consequences of her ambition – a woman whom it is nearly impossible to describe in sympathetic terms, especially if she is also to personify the artist’s calling.

 Here are offered keen-eyed psychological portraits of many of the period’s young authors, such as Ola Hansson, Oscar Levertin, Stella Kleve, Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler, Alfhild Agrell, and Ellen Key. And above all Georg Brandes, who turns her into the bewitched woman. Before Victoria Benedictsson is dragged into the magic circle of the Mountain King, she sees herself more as an author than as a human being. This is also how she wants to present herself at encounters with her colleagues in Stockholm or Copenhagen. The big question is how a simple, ascetic attire can be combined with supreme elegance. “A shadow of Catherine of Medici, and there you have the style […]. An ‘intellectual aristocrat’, an old, tyrannical, hard, cunning woman: there you see what I can signal with my dress and what I should signal. Above all: old. Otherwise all the other things will lack effect. Black plush in the light, black satin during the day; jets in daylight and black pearls in lamplight; on my head black velvet or black spangle. Heavy, expensive, indifferent. Voilà.”

Victoria Benedictsson’s conscious staging of herself as an older, sexually neutral artist is an important part of her identity as an author. It is against this background that it becomes clear why her relationship to Brandes was so disastrous. When he looks down upon her both as an author and as a woman, the studied attire falls off, and she stands completely naked, bereft of her armour and thus, in her own eyes, bereft of the possibilities of life.




The diary begins in a harmless way as an author’s ‘storehouse’ with anecdotes, folktales, copies of letters, fragments of conversations, and observations, but before long it changes character and becomes an instrument of self-analysis. At an early stage, Victoria Benedictsson realised that her diary might be published, and, starting in 1885, her editing efforts become obvious. Her demand for truth involved her having to appear in all her complexity and also exposing her less appealing sides. Gossip, indiscreet speculations, and above all a drawn-out analysis of her own feelings slowly gain prominence in the pages. She sees herself most clearly in her relationship with men, above all with her ‘comrade’ Axel Lundegård – their emotionally loaded intellectual relationship dominates Part Two – and with Georg Brandes – who dominates Part Three.

 In her diaries Victoria Benedictsson takes the step into modern times. It is a contemporary of ours who is speaking here and who, thanks to her unswerving loyalty to her own experiences, makes a Virginia Woolf or an Anaïs Nin seem tame. After Victoria Benedictsson nobody else has, in an equally ruthless way, tested introspection as a method to uncover the contradictions of the female sexual being. Read closely, the diary, with its increasingly detailed analysis of a woman’s state of mind, leaves the impression of a stubborn refusal to play the men’s game. It also conveys a persistent striving for truth in the erotic as well as in the intellectual power struggle between the sexes. Victoria Benedictsson fearlessly treats her own experiences as raw material for literature. Thus, for example, her relationship to Brandes is gradually given the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For Victoria Benedictsson had at a much earlier stage noted down the outline of the dramatised rendering of the tragic love story, which took place in 1886-88. Scenes from other close relationships to men, such as her love interest in the Swedish-American Charles Quillfeldt at the end of the 1870s, or her friendship with the young Axel Lundegård in the middle of the 1880s, are written into the Copenhagen tale about Georg Brandes, with some lines rendered verbatim.

The diaries follow very closely the divergent curves described by Victoria Benedictsson’s writing career and life experiences up to her final suicide. “My diaries are not to be destroyed […]”, she wrote, well aware that it is with her diaries that she takes the step into modern times.

Many female authors used the Modern Breakthrough to discuss the question of how the woman was to develop a certain independence in the context of marriage, often through paid or creative work. Others, as for example Agrell and Edgren Leffler, took a step further in their criticism of the patriarchal institution of marriage. But only few, apart from Stella Kleve and Victoria Benedictsson, ventured to address the burning question as to how the power structure leaves its traces on female sexuality; or the question as to how female desire could be realised in a society with an institutionalised double standard of morality. It was considered inappropriate for women to openly express their opinion on the issue of sexuality. It was bad enough, the establishment thought, when the male authors did so.

 

I Want To Write About Women. By Christina Sjöblad. The History of Nordic Women’sLiterature, July 14, 2011. 






Victoria Benedictsson has been called the model for Hedda Gabler. As her play premieres here, it prompts harsh questions about her suicide - and that of other women artists, says Germaine Greer

In Zola's L'Oeuvre, the artist Claude Lantier, having sacrificed all his relationships for his work, hangs himself in front of the masterpiece he knows he can never finish. Though suicide may be considered an occupational risk for any ordinary mortal who sacrifices all for his or her art, historically only a tiny proportion of male artists have ended their own lives. A much higher proportion of the much lower number of women artists have crowned their achievement with suicide. Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, better known in her own time by the pseudonym Ernst Ahlgren, killed herself in 1888 using the same method as French painter Constance Mayer did in 1821, by cutting her throat with a razor. Both deaths are usually ascribed to unrequited love. Mayer was distraught when Prud'hon failed to marry her after his wife died; Benedictsson was rejected by the critic Georg Brandes, the Danish Harold Bloom of those days.

This week, the National Theatre premieres Benedictsson's play Den Bergtagna as The Enchantment in a version by Clare Bayley, based on a literal translation from the Swedish by Ben Anderman. (In Venne Moberg's translation, the play is called Spellbound.) Benedictsson has been called, on very slender grounds, the Swedish George Eliot, and identified as Ibsen's model for Hedda Gabler. Ibsen was a friend of Brandes and may have heard the story of his dalliance with Benedictsson, but there is nothing to suggest a connection between Benedictsson and Hedda beyond the simple fact that in the play Hedda, too, commits suicide. Strindberg is supposed to have drawn the idea of Miss Julie from Benedictsson, but again they have little in common beyond the fact that Miss Julie, too, cut her own throat, and the play was written within a year of Benedictsson's death.

Georg Brandes was the most influential critic of his day, best known in Britain for his four-volume work, Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century (1872-1875). Widely travelled, more widely read in half a dozen languages and a brilliant lecturer, he was appointed reader in belles lettres at Copenhagen University in 1871. Because he was a Jew, a radical and suspected of atheism, he was not awarded a chair for 30 years. Though, in 1872, he translated John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, he was more of a libertarian than a feminist.

 Seduction of Benedictsson would certainly have been in character. By her own account, Benedictsson seems to have been revolted by his sexual directness when he was with her and desperate for his return when he stayed away. Brandes appears never to have concealed his philandering or promised her anything more than she got; part of her desperation seems to have been caused by her own inability to resist a seduction so cold-blooded and specific. There are some who think no actual sexual relations eventuated. Brandes may well have recoiled before consummating the relationship, but as far as Benedictsson was concerned, the damage was done. Her fatal susceptibility was probably only to be expected in a woman who had lived all her life without love. Brandes should have known better than to mess with her; in his biography, she is not even a footnote.

British ignorance about all things Scandinavian has led to a series of mistaken assumptions about the magnitude of Benedictsson's achievement. In 1871, when 21-year-old Victoria Bruzelius became the second wife of 49-year-old Christian Benedictsson, the Swedish women's movement pioneered by prizewinning novelist Fredrika Bremer had already achieved notable successes. The Swedish art academy, conservatory and medical schools were open to women, and women were attending university lectures. Even so, public attitudes, especially in the provinces, were still narrow and conservative. Victoria bore her husband a daughter, his sixth child, in 1873, and in 1876 another daughter, who lived for three weeks. In 1881, she was injured in a riding accident and remained bedridden for two years.

It was then that she began to write. As she was to say herself, this was the happiest time of her life. In 1884, her novel Money was published (under the name Ernst Ahlgren), an extraordinary success for a writer with no qualification beyond time on her hands. Money deals with the struggle of a young woman who wishes to train as an animal painter and finds herself married off to the local squire instead. As so often happens with female artists, Benedictsson's heroine appears to be herself, married off as she was to the middle-aged postmaster of a provincial town. Ernst Ahlgren soon made contact with leading feminists; Ellen Key became her best friend.

In 1883, a 21-year-old Danish author called Adda Ravnkilde committed suicide in Copenhagen. At that point, none of her work had been published. The next year, her novel Judith Furste was ushered into the world with a foreword by Brandes, and it may have been this that encouraged Benedictsson to think of him as the best possible mentor for herself. Benedictsson was on a trip to Copenhagen to catch up on culture and shopping, when her friend Axel Lundegard, knowing how much she admired Brandes, suggested to him that he visit her in her hotel room. Benedictsson told the story of her seduction by Brandes, ploy by ploy, first in her diary, then in a short story in which the events are transposed to Paris and Brandes becomes a Rodin-figure called Gustave Alland, and finally in her play.

The short story begins, "Upon investigation of the papers of the deceased, the following was found." "The following" is a lengthy suicide note, which might as well be Benedictsson's own. The nameless woman in the story does not accuse her married lover; rather she commits suicide because anyone who has been spellbound, as it were in the thrall of the Mountain King of Scandinavian legend, can never return to live among ordinary people. In the original Swedish, the clue is given by the title of the story, Den Bergtagna, which is also the title of the play. In the play, as not in the story, the seducer is present when the heroine's body is brought into the house, and is told: "Look. Look what you've done." In Bayley's version Alland does not answer; in Moberg's version, he appears to agree that the heroine's death is his work.

Suicide is never the fault of anyone but the perpetrator. Prud'hon did not kill Mayer and Brandes did not kill Benedictsson, but the stigma remains. In both cases, the woman's doomed relationship involved another major creative ego. Male artists seldom make the mistake of falling in love with other artists, and almost never with artists more successful than they. One megalo- maniac per household would seem to be more than enough, but so many women artists cast themselves beneath the chariot wheels of male artists with egos bigger and tougher than theirs that a pattern seems to emerge.

The rollcall of women artist suicides begins slowly at the beginning of the 19th century with Karolina von Günderrode (1806) and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (1838), and gathers momentum with Ravnkilde and Benedictsson, Amy Levy and Veronica Micle (1889), Eleanor Marx (1898), Elisaveta Aleksandrovna Diakonova (1902), Laurence Hope (1904), Georgette Agutte (1922), Gertrude Bell (1926), Charlotte Mew (1928), Dora Carrington (1932), Sara Teasdale (1933), Antonia Pozzi (1938), Alfonsina Storni (1938), Robin Hyde (1938), Virginia Woolf, Penelope Delta, Karin Boye and Marina Tsvetayeva (1941), Julia Acker (1942), Anna Wickham (1943), Frida Kahlo (1954), Elise Cowen (1962), Sylvia Plath and Kay Sage (1963), Ingrid Jonker (1965), Charmian Clift (1969), Diane Arbus (1971), Anne Sexton (1974), Eva Bezwoda (1976), Danielle Collobert (1978), Ana Cristina Cesar (1983). There was a lull, when the trend seemed to have worked itself out, until in 2001 brilliant young playwright Sarah Kane hanged herself with a shoelace, and in 2004 Iris Chang shot herself.

The saddest reflection is that Benedictsson's obsession with Brandes caused a rift between her and the feminists who could have helped her to survive it. In a doomed effort to secure Brandes's love and esteem by engaging in the approved manner with current issues, she wrote Fru Marianne, which he declined to read, and within six months she was lying with her throat cut in the same Copenhagen hotel room where he had seduced her. Her papers were given by her favourite stepdaughter to Axel Lundegard, who had collaborated with Benedictsson on an earlier play called Final. He published various compilations of these and, as well as completing the play of Den Bergtagna, completed her novel Modern (The Mother).

In the play, the heroine is repeatedly warned off by Erna Wallden, an earlier victim of Alland. She is a painter whom the experience of being debauched and abandoned by Alland has made into an unhappy woman, but a better artist. For Benedictsson to have written Erna into Den Bergtagna has the contradictory effect of exonerating Alland for the heroine's death, which seems after all to be a consequence of her own weakness. It is as if Benedictsson is admitting that the only perpetrator of the crime against her is, after all, herself. Audiences of The Enchantment will have much to disagree about - which is, according to Brandes, exactly as it should be.

· The Enchantment is at the Cottlesloe, London until November 1. Box office: 020-7452 3000.

Death and the maiden.  By Germaine Greer. The Guardian, July 26, 2007.