Reception of Foreign Women Writers in the Slovenian Literary System of the Long 19th Century

Edited by Katja Mihurko Poniž

Reception of Foreign Women Writers in the Slovenian Literary System of the Long 19th Century

Edited by: Katja Mihurko Poniž

Expert Reviewers: Barbara Simoniti, Peter Scherber

English Translation:

Melita Silič: Introduction, From Passing References to Inspiring Writers the Presence of Foreign Women Writers in the Press, Libraries, Theatre Performances and in the Works of Slovenian Authors; Leonora Flis: Ambiguous Views on Femininity in the Writings of Two “New Women” in the Fin de sieclè Zofka Kveder’s Inspirational Encounters with Laura Marholm’s Modern women.

English Language Editing: Leonora Flis: Visualization of the WomenWriters Database: Interdisciplinary Collaboration Experiments 2012—2015).

Designed by: Kontrastika

Published by: University of Nova Gorica Press, P.O. Box 301, Vipavska 13, SI-5001 Nova Gorica

Acrobat Reader, ePUB http://www.ung.si/sl/zalozba/http://www.ung.si/en/publisher/27.3.2017

Publication year: 2017 University of Nova Gorica Press

The book was financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info), co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007.

 Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID=289415936 ISBN 978-961-6311-99-1 (epub)ISBN 978-961-7025-00-2 (pdf)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial 4.0 International Licence

Introduction

Katja Mihurko Poniž, Tanja Badalič, Aleš Vaupotič

This book was produced as part of the international collaborative research project “Travelling Texts 1790–1914: The Transnational Reception Of Women’s Writing At the Fringes of Europe”,1 focused on the most important channels of cultural encounters in modern Europe, the circulation of printed texts and their crossing of the cultural, linguistic and national borders during the long 19th century.

The project was dedicated to the research of women participating in the transnational exchanges of literary texts from the historical and geographic perspectives, the role of women as authors, translators, and cultural mediators, striving to determine the nature of the influence of women in the processes of literary exchanges, and how they changed and transformed this discourse. Through the research of circumstances at the fringes of Europe (research included Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch and Slovenian literary fields), we also investigated the question of the asymmetrical statuses between the European centres and peripheries, the phenomenon of cultural encounters, how ideas travelled, how networks and imaginary communities were formed. By focusing on women writers, including those not canonized in their national literatures, we were intent on contributing to the discussion of cultural memory and the approaches in the history of literature – and revealing the forgotten and concealed connections fundamental to understanding European literary history.

Due to extensive data, we have focused on three time windows (1790–1820, 1850–1870, 1890–1914), whereas the reception of women writers in Slovenia was investigated in a broader context. Because of the late development of the Slovenian literary system and the well-documented reception of world literature in the form of a catalogue of foreign authors in Slovenian periodicals preserved at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, the data available far exceed that of other national literatures within the project.

The Slovene literary system, which was still in the process of formation during the 19th century, shared a lot of common traits with European literary systems that blossomed during the Spring of Nations, but it also exhibited quite particular Slovenian characteristics which are briefly introduced below.

The Slovenian ethnic territory of the 19th century encompassed the so-called Slovenian lands or provinces mainly inhabited by the Slovene-speaking population. However, as the Slovenian historian Peter Vodopivec asserts in his Politics of History Education in Slovenia and Slovene History Textbooks since 1990, the so-called Slovene provinces were never homogeneously ethnically Slovene. (Vodopivec 2009: 57) The territory extended between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea and eastwards to include Carniola, with the capital Ljubljana in the centre, the southern part of Carinthia with Klagenfurt in the north, the southern part of Styria with Maribor in the east, Prekmurje in the northeast, the northern part of Istra in the south and Gorizia, Gradisca and Trieste in the west. This territory “has always been a place of transition, a borderland and a crossroads, but also a bridge between different cultures, people, nations and states”. (Štih 2008: 7) During the centuries preceding World War I, it was also a point where several different cultures overlapped, cohabited and intertwined, in particular the Slavic, Germanic and Romance culture. This diversity left its marks on this territory, preserving them in its rich history and culture.

The historical and cultural situation of a territory cannot be reduced to one nation, since the majority of European nations coalesced as political nations as late as in the 19th century and in some areas even later. Consequently, when referring to the 19th-century Slovenian territory, one cannot speak about only one culture, but instead must refer to a multicultural space, where various cultures interlaced. However, the following century brought several important changes. Slovenian people, despite their slow pace of economic development and modernisation, entered the 20th century as a part of the Habsburg Empire and as an identifiable ‘nation’ with a developed political, cultural and social life. Ljubljana had already become the informal capital of Slovenia in the 19th century. In contrast to west Europe, where weaker linguistic and ethnic groups were assimilated up to the 19th century, in central Europe the slower economic and social development, lacking strong central government allowed small nations to develop. The Austrian education system provided an enviable level of literacy and school education, facilitating the formation of Slovenia’s national elite. Right up until the end of the First World War, Slovenes studied primarily in Graz and Vienna, the capital of the Empire. (Štepec 2006: 9–10)

The First World War “stands as a landmark and a turning point in the landscape of modern Slovenian history”. (Luthar in Luthar 2008: 369) In fact, the end of the war brought pivotal changes to Slovenian territory, which in December 1918 became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After centuries under Germanic cultural influence, Slovenes, through accession to Yugoslavia, turned towards their Slavic roots, particularly Balkan culture. By doing so, the Slovenian territory entered another multicultural space.

The influence of the multicultural space was clearly reflected in the literature, which was since its inception primarily connected to the Germanic world. Slovenian culture and language played an essential role in the history of the nation. In their cultural life, the Slovenes were dominated, at least with regard to the written word, by the Austrian authorities. Although not entirely a peasant culture, the opportunity for the development of a literary version of Slovene was severely curtailed before the national awakening of the late 18th century. The Slovenian language was both a unifying and dividing factor in the nation’s history, but the status of the language is the single most important leitmotiv running through the history of this people and can in some senses be said to define the parameters of Slovenian national development. (Gow & Carmichael 2000: 16, Kos 1996: 16) In his extensive work Primerjalna zgodovina slovenske literature (Comparative History of Slovenian Literature), Kos claims that Slovenian literature in its true sense of the word began as late as around 1770; that is to say, at the beginning of the Slovenian Enlightenment. (Kos 2001: 8) Kos then discusses all of the most known Slovenian authors and their works, comparing them to their European counterparts and thus showing upon whom they modelled themselves and by whom they were inspired. His research suggests that Slovenian authors from 1770 to the end of the World War I were strongly influenced by foreign works, in particular German-speaking, but also French, British/Irish, Latin, Italian, Slavic, and others.

The reception of German-speaking writers was significant until the second half of the 19th century, after which Slovenian authors began looking for sources of inspiration elsewhere in Europe. Kos affirms that in the Slovenian literature after 1848, the strong current of Enlightenment ideas began to amalgamate and intertwine with other contemporary literary currents into complex mixtures. (Kos 2001: 118) This was reflected in the Slovenian literary works in the form of different influences from 18th-century European literature. (Ibid., 118) German influence was nonetheless still prominent after 1848.

According to Marko Juvan, the 19th and early 20th century Slovenian ethnic territory was defined by cultural nationalism, term originally coined by the Dutch comparatist Joep Leersen pointing to “the role of language as well as folk traditions, collective memory, literature, culture, art and science as principal – actually apparently the only possible – factors that among people through the process of self-cultivation (Bildung) form and preserve national self-awareness, and demonstrate national identity in the interethnic and interstate relations.” (Juvan 2008: 10) Juvan correctly ascertains the ideological foundation of both Slovenian literary history as well as comparative literature, where he also identifies premises deriving from cultural nationalism. (Ibid., 14) However, cultural nationalism is not the only ideological matrix that formed the foundation of the Slovenian literary history and comparative literature. Numerous critics and even records in literary histories and overviews provide evidence that the writers were committed to the traditional imagery of gender roles in the society and consequently ideologically biased, but they nevertheless influenced the formation of a literary canon in the 19th and 20th century and the exclusion of women writers both from the overviews of the Slovenian as well as world literature.

In regard to European women authors, Kos only mentions seven names: the German Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880), the French George Sand (1804–1867), Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), the English Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and the Russian Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941). The literary activity of the latter four authors is briefly mentioned as an eventual influence on Slovenian authors only after 1950. (Kos 2001: 344–362) Madame de Staël is mentioned in relation to European Romanticism (Kos 2001: 106), while Ida Hahn-Hahn is mentioned as a less central German novelist. (Ibid., 163) Among the above mentioned women writers only George Sand is supposed to have exerted influence upon one 19th-century Slovenian male author, namely Josip Jurčič (1844–1881). (Ibid., 168)

Based on Kos’ book, one would think that women writers, either foreign or Slovenian, hardly existed before the 20th century, but this is anything but true. In Slovenian territory, women began appearing in public life as late as the 19th century. Yet, there is some evidence of women who had been noted before that time. Peter Vodopivec affirms that women in Slovenian history before the 19th century impressed more on Slovenian historical memory as literary than historical heroines, even though they were real historical personages. (Vodopivec 2008: 30–31)

The year 1848 was not only the first year when Slovene women voiced public demands, it was also a turning point in the history of Slovene women’s literature. During the 1840s the representatives of Slovenian literature were exclusively male. Only by the end of that decade did Slovenian women writers appear. The first Slovenian woman author is considered to be Fany Hausmann (1818–1853) who published her poems between 1848–1849 in the journals Celjske novine (Celje’s News) and Slovenija (Slovenia). She was followed by Luiza Pesjak (1828–1898), Josipina Turnograjska (1833–1854) and Pavlina Pajk (1954–1901). At the end of the 19th century, an increasing number of women writers emerged in literature who were very familiar with their foreign and Slovenian predecessors and contemporaries, whom they were inspired by and who served as examples. The first chapter illustrates the extent of the perception of foreign women writers in the Slovenian ethnic territory. Based on research conducted by Tanja Badalič, many names and works of women writers were found in Slovenian periodicals and libraries. In addition to identifying intertextual connections, Badalič argues that interesting dynamics of literary perception were also a characteristic of Slovenian literature of that time.

The second chapter is dedicated to research into the influence of the controversial writer Laura Marholm (1854–1928) and the principal Slovenian modernist Zofka Kveder (1878–1926). A comprehensive comparative analysis reveals the overlooked qualities of the book Modern Women (Das Buch der Frauen, 1894) trying to answer the question why this particular book inspired Zofka Kveder’s feminist collections of short stories Misterij žene (The Mystery of a Woman, 1900). The author of this chapter concludes that the reception of Laura Marholm was as ambivalent as her book, which became evident in the analysis of the reception of another writer, Zofka Kveder herself. The research to now was focused only on the reception in the western part of Europe, which demonstrated a positive reception by the public with traditional views of women, and a negative reception by feminists.

The third chapter illustrates the possibilities of visualisation of information from the “NEWW Women Writers Virtual Research Environment”, which is an upgrade of the “database WomenWriters” conceived by a group of women researchers back in the 1990s. This database significantly developed within the COST Action Women Writers in History. The Slovenian team, in particular Tanja Badalič, entered a great deal of information on the reception in the Slovenian literary field into “NEWW Women Writers Virtual Research Environment”.

In their contribution, Aleš Vaupotič and Narvika Bovcon explain how students at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, designed different visualisations and thereby reflect the relation between a literary scholar, a graphic designer and a computer engineer.

The research into the Slovenian reception of women writers showed many interesting specifics in regard to European women authors in so-called small literature, which mainly ‘received’ from other national literatures. A small corpus of texts in which the reception is documented enabled a detailed review and analysis which demonstrated that a number of women authors wrote and were read during the 19th century, but were erased from the cultural memory in the canonisation process which favoured male authors. With the approach of distant reading we discovered many forgotten names; but a complete picture also required close reading, which revealed specifics of the reception that would have otherwise remained unclear. These three contributions are only a part of the Slovenian research within the project “Travelling Texts 1790-1914: The Transnational Reception Of Women’s Writing At the Fringes of Europe”. Some findings were published in scientific papers during the project, while a large portion is included in the joint monograph of all project partners. We take this opportunity to thank them for three professionally rich and inspiring years of research. For this publication, credit also goes to the reviewers, Barbara Simoniti, PhD, who followed our work as a member of the Advisory Board, and Prof. Peter Scherber, PhD, translators Melita Silič and Leonora Flis, PhD, as well as Mirjana Frelih from the University of Nova Gorica Press. Thank you all very much.

From Passing References to Inspiring Writers:the Presence of Foreign Women Writers in the Press, Libraries, Theatre Performances and in the Works of Slovenian Authors

Tanja Badalič

As indicated in the introduction, multiculturalism of the Slovenian territory in the 19th century was reflected in the culture, in particular literature, which was mostly connected to the Germanic world. This significantly affected the reception of European women writers from the early 19th century to 1918 when with the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Slovenian population entered a new form of multiculturalism and to some degree may have been said to have returned to its Slavic roots. Slovenian literary history as regards the presence of women writers in the European literature, particularly their reception in Slovenian territory, is incomplete. For example, during the period in question, the Slovenian literary historian Janko Kos mentions only the French woman writer George Sand as an eventual influence on one Slovenian author, Josip Jurčič (Kos 2001: 168), whereas based on further research, at the time more than seven hundred eighty European women writers were received in the Slovenian territory, which suggests that this reception has to date been overlooked. This chapter elucidates this information: where, in what manner and who received the women writers.

Various types of reception of foreign women writers are identified, starting with the Slovenian, German and French periodical press published locally in the 19th century. A lot of citations, articles and obituaries naming women writers have been located in such periodicals, as well as reviews of their works. Newspaper columns and literary overviews publishing news about the authors and their works are given special attention. Moreover, the very first mention of a foreign woman writer has also been identified in the periodical press. Next comes the reception in the catalogues of lending libraries, private collections and the repertoire of the Slovenian theatres which shows what works by foreign women writers were actually available locally. Thanks to this repertoire we were able to check what works were staged in local theatres in the 19th century. This is followed by the Slovenian translations of works listed in the local bibliographies either as stand-alone publications or published in periodicals. Translations are a relevant indicator of changes after 1848 because translating increased significantly, particularly in relation to the national movement. Finally, there is a section dedicated to the reception of European women writers in Slovenian literary works and by local authors, both women and men. Indeed, local writers discussed foreign women writers in their correspondence, they quoted and mentioned them in their works, notes or diaries, published articles and obituaries as well as reviews of their works, many of which they translated. All of this indicates a potential, if not likely, influence of foreign women writers on Slovenian writers and their significance for Slovenian literature and culture in general.

Periodical Press

The reception of European women writers was investigated using the catalogue of foreign authors in Slovenian periodicals preserved at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. It covers foreign writers including novelists and poets as well as philosophers, philologists and historians in Slovenian and foreign-language periodicals in the territory of modern-day Slovenia from 1770 to 1970. The records are arranged in alphabetical and chronological order by author and national literature in a card catalogue. Each record includes bibliographic information on the item and is categorized according to its size and relevance. Hence the catalogue provides a detailed insight into the references to and thus presence of an individual writer or national literature in Slovenian periodicals of the time and more information than bibliographies2 normally do.

The very first reception of a foreign woman writer was found in the periodical press: the French Amélie-Julie Candeille (1767–1834) was mentioned in 1812 in the Télégraphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennes (Official Telegraph of Illyrian Provinces), the official gazette of the French authorities in the Illyrian Provinces. Issued in Ljubljana from 1810 to 1813 in French and occasionally in German and Italian, the gazette also published feuilletons and book reviews. Nonetheless, with the exception of the first Slovenian periodical Lublanske novice (Ljubljana’s News, 1797–1800), the literary almanac Kranjska čbelica (The Carniolan Bee, 1830–1834) and the periodical Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (Agricultural and Artisan News, 1843–1902), most periodicals in the first half of the 19th century were in German, which is reflected in terms of reception.3 During this period, European women writers were mentioned in the German magazines Carinthia (1811), Illyrisches Blatt (1819–1849), Carniolia (1838–1844) and in the Slovenian Kmetijske in rokodelske novice. The second mention of a foreign woman writer was found in Carinthia in 1816, while the first mention in Slovenian – Kmetijske in rokodelske novice – dates to 1845. After 1850, with the exception of the German Blätter aus Krain (1857–1865) and Laibacher Zeitung (1784–1807; 1821–1918) which mainly represented German-speaking authors, the names of European women writers began appearing in other periodicals, mostly Slovenian. Mention should be made of the following: Zora (Dawn, 1872–1878), Slovenec (The Slovene, 1873–1945), Slovenski narod (Slovene Nation, 1868–1940), Ljubljanski zvon (Ljubljana’s Bell, 1881–1940), Dom in svet (Home and World, 1888–1944), Slovenka (The Slovene Woman, 1897–1900) and three papers that published news from the Slavic world and were significant for their reception of Slavic women writers: Slavjan (Slavian, 1873–1875), Slovan (Slav, 1884–1887) in Slovanski svet (Slavic World, 1888–1899). Finally, we should mention Slovenska žena (Slovene Woman, 1912–1913), a periodical with various contents similar to Slovenka obviously aimed at women readers. The ideological background could substantially affect the reception of a particular writer and her presentation. This is particularly evident in two diametrically opposed periodicals – the liberal Ljubljanski zvon and the Catholic Dom in svet, which wrote about, for instance, George Sand, from completely different perspectives. This also holds true for the conservative Slovenec and the more progressive Slovenski narod.

In the periodical press, the writers were introduced in different ways, most frequently in brief mentions within longer contributions.4 However, articles, reports and obituaries were also dedicated to them. Their works were addressed in reviews, notices on translations and literary overviews, and occasionally their quotes were published. Thanks to literary overviews, the Slovenian readers became familiar with many names and works of contemporary women writers as well as those from the past. In 1912, Slovenska žena published two such overviews: Pregled glavnih zastopnic francoskega slovstva (An Overview of the Main Women Representatives of French Literature)5 by Anton Debeljak6 and Italijanske pisateljice in pesnice (Italian Women Writers and Poets)7 by Ljudmila Prunk (1878–1947). In his introduction, Debeljak pointed to the situation of women in society preventing them from fully expressing their creativity, but took the example of French writers as evidence that things were changing. The overview included sixty-two women writers and poets from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. In Debeljak’s view, the following were worthy of special notice: Marie de France (12th century), Christine de Pizan (1364–1430?), Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), Madame de Scudéry (1607–1701), Madame de La Fayette (1634–1639), Antoinette Deshoulières (1638–1694), Madame de Staël (1766–1817), George Sand (1804–1876), Louise Ackermann (1813–1890), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859), Juliette Adam (1836–1936), Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954), Rachilde (1860–1953) and Anna de Noailles (1876–1933). George Sand, who in the author’s opinion outstripped all her contemporaries, was given the most attention. The last part of the article was about contemporary writers.

The Slovenian writer and translator Ljudmila Prunk published an article8 that focused on Italian women writers and poets – in total thirty-two, mainly poets. In the article she discussed their work and in some cases provided biographical data. Among others, her list included Ada Negri (1870–1945), Neera (1846–1918), Amalia Guglielminetti (1881–1841), Luisa Macina Gervasio (1872–1936), Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), Annie Vivanti (1866–1942) and Luisa Anzoletti (1863–1925).

Literary overviews of exclusively Slavic women writers were published by Zora, Slovanski svet, Ljubljanski zvon and Veda (Science). Zora published an overview of thirty-six Yugoslav women writers,9 of which eleven were Slovene. Slovanski svet printed an article about seven Ukrainian writers using a dedicated almanac.10 Ljubljanski zvon published a summary of Croatian poetry in Dalmatia from the 15th to 18th century with a special emphasis on the female poets, and an article on Russian poetry11 and Russian writers12 which, although to a lesser extent, also discussed women writers. An article on Czech literature by the Czech literary historian and critic Arne Novák (1880–1939) was published in Veda.13 Among the eleven women writers he addressed in most detail were Karolina Světlá (1830–1899), Gabriela Preissová (1862–1946), Božena Němcová (1820?–1862), Teréza Nováková (1853–1912), Růžena Svobodová (1868–1920) and Božena Viková-Kunětická (1862–1934).

The names of women writers and their works often appeared in columns related to culture and art, mainly literature, including theatre, as well as in news items. Most mentions were located in the following columns: Književnost in umetnost (Literature and Art)14 and Album čeških žen (Album of Czech Women) in the periodical Slovenka; Književne novosti (New Literary Works), Slovenski glasnik (Slovenian Herald), Listek (Feuilleton) and Gledališče (Theatre) in Ljubljanski zvon; Književnost or Slovstvo (Literature) and To in ono (This and That) in Dom in svet; Razne vesti (Various News) and Dnevne vesti (Daily News) in Slovenski narod. In the German Laibacher Zeitung women writers were mainly mentioned in the columns Kunst und Literatur (Art and Literature) and Feuilleton; through publishing shorter literary texts, the latter played a significant role in their distribution.

In general, the pieces on women writers were generous with information of a private nature, such as their dressing style, smoking habits, love affairs, religious beliefs, losses of children, spirit of travelling, nobility (or not) of birth, etc. However, they also discussed their charity work, patriotism, endeavours for women’s education and emancipation, and connections with other famous writers. More prominent writers such as George Sand and Karolina Světlá, rated an obituary. The periodical press also reported on their literary activity in the form of reviews and critiques of their works, notices on the publication of a new work and translations into Slovene. The works themselves, particularly poems, were rarely published. The women writers best received in the periodicals – with a minimum of thirty mentions – were George Sand, Madame de Staël, Ada Negri, Eliška Krásnohorská (1847–1926), Božena Němcová, Gabriela Preissová, Karolina Světlá, Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910), Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910) and Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer (1800–1868).

The periodicals published in Slovenian territory in the 19th century played a crucial role in the reception of European women writers. From 1812, when apparently the first foreign writer was mentioned, up to and including 1918, a great variety of information regarding more than three hundred European women writers and their works was published. The increasing number of Slovenian periodicals after the 1848 significantly contributed to such reception.

Lending Libraries and Private Collections

In Slovenian territory, the popularity of foreign women writers was enhanced by public and private lending libraries, which carried a lot of their works, in particular novels. And of course libraries – whose members included women – played an important role in the promotion of reading culture among Slovenes. The first public libraries emerged in the 18th century, although it wasn’t until the 19th that they really blossomed. (Dular 2003: 117) During this time a lot of clubs and associations founded libraries, and some aimed particularly toward women. (Ibid., 117) After 1848, other organisations promoted reading culture in the Slovenian territory. Mohorjeva družba (St. Hermagoras Society), founded in 1851, was to publish books for the general reading public, while Slovenska matica (The Slovenian Literary Society), established in 1864, was more oriented towards professional and academic literature. (Granda 2008: 159, 165)

In the study, the catalogues of five lending libraries were examined: Leopold Paternolli’s,15 Janez Giontini’s,16 Hedwig von Radics’,17 Splošno žensko društvo (General Women’s Society)18 and Javna ljudska knjižnica gospodarskega in izobraževalnega društva za dvorski okraj v Ljubljani (Public Library of the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District),19 as well as two private collections: Francesco Grisoni’s20 and Janko Kersnik’s.21 Unfortunately, the catalogues published between 1833 and 1916 don’t provide any information on the number of readers because no loan records have been preserved. Nonetheless, it can be assumed that in large part the lenders bought books which were popular among readers. The same is true to some degree for private collections. Based on the fact that certain authors and their books were located in several catalogues, it can be concluded that they were popular with readers.

Leopold Paternolli’s Library Catalogues (1833, 1834, 1854)

The catalogues of Leopold Paternolli’s library in Ljubljana included works of thirty-five identified women writers, of which fifteen were French, seven English and the rest German-speaking. Some works were also in the French original or translation and in Italian translation. One was English original – Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1764) by the English writer Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762). The writer with the largest number of listed books (twelve) was Caroline Pichler (1769–1843), followed by Madame de Genlis (1746–1830) with six, Madame de Beaumont (1711–1780) with five and Sophie Cottin (1770–1807) with three. Other writers were only listed with one or two works. A major part of books listed in the catalogue can also be found in Janez Giontini’s library which is hardly a coincidence because he worked in Paternolli’s for some time. (Šlebinger 1935: 213)

Janez Giontini’s Library Catalogues (1846, 1851, 1853, 1856, 1860, 1861, 1865)

The catalogues of Janez Giontini’s library in Ljubljana are the most extensive of all investigated catalogues, covering two decades. Forty-one European women writers were identified, mainly German-speaking, followed by French and English-speaking. In general, fewer than five works per author were listed. The greater part of the works were German originals while the remaining were mainly German translations. The catalogues also included short lists of books in foreign languages (English, French and Italian). The time span of Giontini’s catalogues (1846–1865) allows us to track the growing number of books and can thereby indicate the readers’ preference for a particular writer or her works. Our assumption is confirmed by the case of George Sand, whose two works listed in the 1846 catalogue increased to over thirty by 1865. Moreover, her works were available in several languages: French original and/or German and/or Italian translation. Similarly, while none of the works by Amalie Schoppe (1791–1858) and Luise Mühlbach (1814–1873) were listed in the first catalogue, later their number increased to twenty-six and twenty-eight, respectively. Emilie Flygare-Carlén (1807–1892) had more than twenty of her books listed. The writers with more than ten and fewer than twenty works included Caroline Pichler, Ida Hahn-Hahn and Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), indicating women writers appreciated among the Slovenian readers were not limited to the French, Italian, German and English, as Emilie Flygare-Carlén and Fredrika Bremer were Swedish. French writers, including Marie le Prince de Beaumont, Madame de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, Comtesse Dash (1804–1872) and Elisabeth Charlotte Pauline Guizot (1773–1827), all seem to have been popular; as was the German Johanne Schopenhauer (1766–1838), with more than five works, of which some were also available in French or Italian translation. Interesting enough, only one writer of Slavic origin was listed in the catalogues, the Czech Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová (1785–1845), whose book with the telling title Ein belehrendes Unterhaltungs-Buch für Mädchen, welche gute Frauen werden wollen (An Instructive and Entertaining Book for Girls who Want to be Good Wives, 1849) was translated into German.

Hedwig von Radics’s Library Catalogue (1898)

In her home in Ljubljana, the Austrian writer Hedwig von Radics opened a public-private library which provided citizens “free access to a large number of books which were not printed only in Ljubljana but also came from German and French cultural areas.” (Žigon 2012: 161) She acquired library copies “by buying them, though she mainly got them from her acquaintances, acknowledged men and women writers of the time, or review copies that she obtained from publishers for free.” (Ibid., 161) Based on the library catalogue which has been preserved, there were a total of 3,586 books. This catalogue requires special attention. Considering that the owner was a writer herself, we may presume she was interested in the literary work of women and consequently included women writers in her collection. In fact, of all investigated catalogues, hers comprised the largest number of identified women writers, a total of ninety-five. The works were German originals or translations, with the exception of Mauprat and Histoire de ma vie by George Sand and La femme de Putiphar by Judith Gautier (1845–1917) that were French originals. The majority of writers were German, followed by English (Mrs Alexander (1825–1902), Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924), Mary Elisabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Anna Brassey (1839–1887), Lucy Clifford (1846– 1929), Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–1885), Beatrix Harraden (1864–1936), Florence Marryat (1833–1899), Helen Mathers (1853–1920), Ouida (1839–1908), Frances Mary Peard (1835–1923), Florence Warden (1857–1929)). Some Swedish (Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Anne-Charlotte Edgren-Leffler (1849–1892), Mathilde Malling (1864–1942), Marie Sophie Schwartz (1819–1894)), French (George Sand, Gyp (1849–1932), Jeanne Mairet (1843–1890), Judith Gautier) and Italian (Neera, Maria Savi Lopez (1846–1940), Matilde Serao (1856–1927)) writers were also listed; only two of Slav origin were identified – the Polish Eliza Orzeszkowa and the Bosnian writer and journalist Milena Mrazović (1863–1927), each with one work translated into German. The catalogue also contained the Norwegian writer Amalie Skram (1846–1905), the Swiss Johanna Spyri (1827–1901), the Hungarian Helene von Beniczky-Bajza (1840–1905) and the American feminist writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911).

With twenty-two works, Natalie von Eschstruth (1860–1939) was the writer with the largest number of works listed in the catalogue. This is no surprise as Radics not only personally knew Natalie von Eschstruth, but also wrote reviews of her works. (Ibid., 163) A number of other writers, including Paul Maria Lacroma (1851–1929), Emma Laddey (1841–1892), Hermine Proschko (1851–1923) and Lina Morgenstern (1830–1909), were also Radics’ friends or acquaintances. (Žigon 2012: 162–163) According to Tanja Žigon, this type of friendship brought about “’intellectual’ connections and well-organised social networking of women writers who collaborated in the creative and private arenas. They informed each other of new books, exchanged copies of books as well as published reviews, and analysed in their letters the novels they read while also discussing their personal problems and blows of fate.” (Ibid., 163) These relations explain why many women writers were listed exclusively in this and none of the other investigated catalogues. Writers with at least ten works included A. von der Elbe (Auguste von der Decken, 1827–1908), E. Werner (Elisabeth Bürstenbinder, 1838–1918), Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) and Eugenie Marlitt (1825–1887); and with more than five works Wilhelmine Heimburg (Bertha Behrens, 1848–1912), Ossip Schubin (Lula Kirschner, 1854–1934), Ida Boy-Ed (1852–1928), Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), Franziska von Kapff Essenther (1849–1899), Ida Klein (1828–1899), Martin Bauer (Selma Martini, 1853–1900), Marie Bernhard (1852–1937), Paul Maria Lacroma, Marie Sophie Schwartz, M. Herbert (Therese Keiter, 1859–1925 ), Vely E. C. (1848–1934), Elise Polko (1822–1899), Marie Najmayer (?) and Doris Spättgen (1847–1925). With the exception of Swedish writers Emilie Flygare-Carlén and Marie Sophie Schwartz, writers with multiple works listed in the catalogue were German.

Catalogue of the General Women’s Society Library (1905)

The catalogue of the General Women’s Society Library22 is the first of the examined catalogues that was published in Slovene. It had forty-eight works of foreign women writers listed, including the works of seven Slavic authors translated into Slovene: Gabriela Preissová with three works, Božena Němcová and Ľudmila Podjavorinská (1872–1951) with two, Waleria Morzkowska (1832–1903), Eliza Orzeszkowa, Anna Řeháková (1850–1937) and Karolina Světlá each with one work. Other books were in German, except for Život (Life), written by the Croatian Nina Silko.23 Although the majority of writers were German-speaking, other nationalities were also identified: English, French, Italian, Swedish, Russian and Romanian – for instance George Egerton (1859–1945), George Sand, Neera, Ada Negri, Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda (1871–1936), Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), Ellen Key (1849–1926), Anne Charlotte Leffler, Amalie Skram, Sonja Kovalevsky (1850–1891) and Carmen Sylva (1843–1916). Luise Mühlbach had four works listed, Ľudmila Podjavorinská, Gabriela Preissová, Ada Negri, Amalie Skram, Bertha von Suttner, Jeanne Marni (1854–1910) and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach had three, and other writers one.

Catalogue of the Public Library of the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District (1916)

Also published in Slovene, the catalogue of the Public Library of the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District24 comprised some foreign works translated into Slovene. Fifteen of twenty-three identified foreign women writers were listed with Slovenian translations: Selma Lagerlöf, Božena Němcová, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, Marie Knauff (1842–1895), Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sophie Cottin, Maria Konopnicka, Karolina Světlá, Anna Řeháková and Mariya Krestovskaya (1862–1910) were listed with one, Eliza Orzeszkowa with two, Božena Viková-Kunětická and Ľudmila Podjavorinská with three, Mariya Vilinska (Marko Vovchok, 1833–1907) with four and Gabriela Preissová with five. The Croatian writer Milena Sajvert Pokupska25 was listed with one book in her mother tongue. Other works were in their German original or translated into German.

Like in others, this catalogue included mainly German or Austrian women writers. As to other nationalities, the following are worth noting: Bucura Dumbravă (1868–1926), Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921), Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Ellen Key, Amalie Skram, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elisabeth Braddon and Matilde Serao. Natalie von Eschstruth, with forty-four works, had the most by a single author listed; next was Eufemia von Adlersfeld-Ballestrem (1854–1941) with forty-two, Marie Bernhard with twenty, E. Werner with eighteen, Emil Marriot (1855–1938) with thirteen, Eugenie Marlitt with ten and George Sand with seven works.

Francesco Grisoni’s and Janko Kersnik’s Private Collections

Unlike the library catalogues, Francesco Grisoni’s and Janko Kersnik’s private collections comprised significantly fewer foreign women writers. Kersnik’s included works of sixteen authors of German, Austrian, English, French, Swedish, Spanish and Hungarian origin. Emilie Flygare-Carlén was listed with four works, followed by George Sand with three. All works were either in their German original or translated into German. Jane Eyre (1847) by the English writer Charlotte Brontë was identified in two different German editions: Johanna Eyre, die Waise von Lowood (Prochaska) and Jane Eyre oder die Waise aus Lowood (Hartleben). The catalogue also included the Spanish writer Fernán Caballero (1796–1877) translated into German: Spanische Novellen (Spanish Novels).

The catalogue of Francesco Grisoni’s private collection is a valuable source because it was the only one located outside Ljubljana, in Koper,26 on the fringe of Slovenian territory. Grisoni’s family came from Venice, which is reflected in the selection of books with evident Romance influence. Francesco Grisoni travelled to France several times and probably acquired most of the books there. His collection contained works by twelve identified women writers, of which nine were French. Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1768–1821) was the only author of German origin and Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) the only English. The collection also included Giustina Renier Michiel (1755–1832), a writer of Venetian origin, with her extensive work Origine delle feste veneziane (The Origin of the Venetian Festivals, 1817). This was the only book in Italian; the others were either French originals or translations. Madame de Stäel was listed with three works, while other writers had but one or two. All the works, except the novels Corinne (1807) and Delphine (1802) by Madame de Stäel, were memoirs, letters or dialogues, which undoubtedly testifies to Grisoni’s interest in history. (Šauperl 2005)

Comparison between Catalogues and Collections

Works by European women writers were listed in all the investigated catalogues. Despite the lack of any loan records, we can assume that the writers were well received by Slovenian men and women readers. With the exception of Grisoni’s private collection, the majority of works were in German, either in the original or translation. Some of the listed works were French, English, Italian and Croatian originals or translations. Due to increased interest in translating in the late 19th century, the early 20th century catalogues comprised Slovenian translations of foreign women writers, mainly Slavic, more precisely Czech and Polish. There were hardly any translations of German authors, which is most likely attributable to the general knowledge of German language which allowed Slovenes to read German originals and translations of literary works from the western and northern part of Europe (mainly UK, France and Sweden) into German. (Hladnik 1992)

When in the second half of the 19th and in particular at the threshold of the new century Slovene people began to re-discover their Slavic roots, they became interested in Slavic culture and literature which, however, had been poorly translated into German. Hence the need to learn and connect with other Slavic nations promoted the translation of Slavic literature into Slovene, which was consequently reflected in library catalogues and private collections.

The library catalogues demonstrated considerable national variety of the writers who came from different parts of Europe. Most of them were of German and Austrian origin, followed by French- and English-speaking authors. Swedish and Italian writers were also listed in the greater part of the catalogues, while the number of Czech and Polish only increased in the early 20th century. The number of Spanish, Norwegian, Swiss, Croatian, Romanian, Russian, Danish and Hungarian writers was substantially lower. Some writers were identified in several catalogues, suggesting their popularity among readers. For example, the works by Charlotte Brontë, Natalie von Eschstruth, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, George Sand, Marie Sophie Schwartz and Bertha von Suttner were listed in four library catalogues or private collections, and the works by Eufemia Adlersfeld-Ballestrem, Helene von Beniczky Bajza, Valeska Bethusy-Huc (1849–1926), Helene Böhlau (1859–1940), Comtesse Dash, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Madame de Genlis, Jeanne Mairet, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Henriette von Paalzow (1788–1847), Matilde Serao and Anna Astl-Leonhard (1860–1924) in three.

Through the examination of catalogues we were able to determine what works by European women writers were available in Slovenian territory in the 19th century and in what way the readers showed interest in particular works or authors. A shift in the reception of writers that occurred at the turn of the century was most likely related to the national movement and consequent increased interest in Slavic writers instead of the Germans who dominated earlier.

Repertoire of Slovenian Theatres 1867–1967

The Repertoire of Slovenian Theatres contains information on the plays staged between 1867 and 1967. This source was included in the research to determine what women writers’ works or adaptations contributed to the theatres’ repertoire. Plays were staged in the following theatres: Slovensko narodno gledališče Drama Ljubljana (Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana), Slovensko gledališče v Trstu (Slovenian Theatre In Triste), Drama Slovensko narodno gledališče Maribor (Drama Slovenian National Theatre Maribor) and Okrajno gledališče na Ptuju (District Theatre in Ptuj). By 1918, sixteen works of European women writers had been performed in Ljubljana, while other theatres staged one work of these sixteen. All plays were performed in Slovene.

Works staged in the Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana include the following:

Writer: Therese Megerle

Original title: Im Dorf (1859)

Slovenian/English translation: Na kmetih (In the Village)

Year of first staging: 1873

Original title: Der Graf Monte-Christo (1859, adaptation of the novel by Alexander Dumas)

Slovenian/English translation: Grof Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Christo)

Year of first staging: 1908

Writer: Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffert

Original title Der Goldbauer (1860)

Slovenian/English translation Nasledki skrivnostne prisege/Ukročena trmoglavost (The Gold Farmer)

Year of first staging 1874

Original title Die Grille (1856, adaptation of the novel La petite Fadette by George Sand)

Slovenian/English translation Cvrček (The Cricket)

Year of first staging 1876

Original title Die Waise von Lowood (1853, adaptation of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë)27

Slovenian/English translation Lowoodska sirota (The Orphan of Lowood)

Year of first staging 1876

Original title Dorf und Stadt (1848)

Slovenian/English translation Mesto in vas (Village and Town)

Year of first staging 1888

Writer: Marie Knauff

Original title: Wer zuletzt lacht (1876)

Slovenian/English translation: Kdor se poslednji smeje (He Who Laughs Last)

Year of first staging: 1876

Writer: Božena Viková-Kunětická

Original title: Sberatelka starožitnosti (1890)

Slovenian/English translation: Starinarica (Collector of Antiquities)

Year of first staging: 1892

Original title: Holčička (1905)

Slovenian/English translation: Punčka (A Little Girl)

Year of first staging: 1896

Writer: Adelheid Wette (1858–1916)

Original title: Hänsel und Gretel (1894)

Slovenian/English translation: Janko in Metka (Hansel and Gretel)

Year of first staging: 1896

Writer: Maria Thiede28

Original title: Rotkäppchen

Slovenian/English translation: Rdeča kapica (Little Red Riding Hood)

Year of first staging: 1902

Original title: Wintermärchen

Slovenian/English translation: Zimska pravljica (Winter Fairy Tale)

Year of first staging: 1913

Writer: Gabriela Preissová

Original title: Gazdina roba (1890)

Slovenian/English translation: Žena sužnja (The Farmer’s Wench)

Year of first staging: 1904

Writer: Frances Eliza Burnett-Hodgson

Original title: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886)

Slovenian/English translation: Mali lord (Little Lord)

Year of first staging: 1906

Writer: Elise Bethge-Truhn (1838–1889)

Original title: Der armen Kinder Weihnacht oder die Schutzgeister (1899)

Slovenian/English translation: V božični noči (The Poor Kids or the Guardian Spirits of Christmas)

Year of first staging: 1909

Writer: Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921)

Original title: Moralność pani Dulskiej (1906)

Slovenian/English translation: Morala gospe Dulske (The Morals of Lady Dulska)

Year of first staging: 1910

Rotkäppchen by Marie Thiede was staged in Drama Slovenian National Theatre Maribor in 1912, and in the District Theatre in Ptuj in 1913. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s adaptation of Jane Eyre was put on stage at the Slovenian Theatre in Trieste in 1907. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s Der Goldbauer, Die Grille and Die Waise von Lowood, as well as Marie Knauff’s Wer zuletzt lacht were staged several times – hence we could assume they were well received by Slovenian audiences. It is interesting that although Slavic women writers were more an exception than the rule in the library catalogues until the early 20th century, the theatre repertoire provides a different picture: of ten writers, six were of German origin, three Slavic and one English.

All the performances were staged in Slovene; all works and adaptations were translated into Slovene, a valuable piece of information in regard to the local reception of foreign writers. It should be noted though that sometimes the adaptations were quite different from the original, as was the case with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, dramatised by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer and entitled Die Waise von Lowood (The Orphan of Lowood), which was acclaimed by Slovenian audiences. According to Katarina Bogataj-Gradišnik, the novel was made famous in Slovenian territory by this adaptation, which, due to extensive changes, more resembles “quite plain melodrama.” (Bogataj-Gradišnik 1984: 139–140) This example testifies to the fact that the translation, or better yet, the translations of translations and theatre adaptations, could digress so far from the original as to become something else entirely, and therefore audiences could not, from watching a play adapted from a novel, have any idea as to the authenticity of the work. The popularity of some performances was also enhanced by the press, which promptly published reviews and notes about their various successes.

Translations

The translation of books into Slovene in the 19th century was affected by several factors which makes it difficult to determine why a particular work was translated or not. The translations of European women writers were published either as a stand-alone publications or serialised in a periodical. Although some translations have already been included in the sections of periodicals, catalogues and the repertoires of Slovenian theatres, they will be discussed again where emphasis is deemed instructive.

In her research on Slovenian literary translation, Majda Stanovnik argued that translations and attempts at writing original texts often intertwined, in particular during the Enlightenment and later in the 19th century (1780–1830). (Stanovnik 2005: 313) However, equal recognition of translated and native literature was increasingly questioned by nationally conscious poets, critics and editors after 1848; translations were marked as foreign material, promoting foreign values and a foreign spirit, and therefore threatening to Slovenia’s modest native literary corpus. (Ibid., 314) A good example is the reflection on literature by the Slovenian writer Josip Stritar (1836–1923) in his text Zona (Zone) published in Zvon (Bell) in 1876. According to Stritar, the Slovenes did not need their own Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine or George Sand, but should rather wait until “they come along in time, and Fausts and Hamlets, our Iliads and Valentines are born from our native soil” and argued: “[…] because we can’t have our own, original, we want to have them at least translated believing that we enrich our literature. This is all just appearance – lent goods! National literature doesn’t begin with translations nor imitation. […] a nation this small can’t waste its strengths.” (Stritar 1955: 346)

Later, however, translations were acknowledged as a necessary complement to Slovenian literature as demonstrated by Ivan Prijatelj (1875–1937), a translator of Russian literature, who in early 20th century declared literary translation to be an indispensable part of Slovenian culture, which could not prosper in isolation. (Stanovnik 2005: 314)

It was the national movement in the second half of the 19th century that revived the interest of Slovenian people in Slavic culture and literature that significantly enhanced translations. A number of works from Slavic languages were translated, in particular from Czech, Polish, Slovak, Russian and Ukrainian. Vekoslav Benković, the translator of Stara Romanka (Roman’s Wife, Romanowa, 1888) by the Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa, dedicated some words to the author and her work at the end of the book, saying that this “gentle woman writer will find favour – as she did with Czechs who already have about twenty volumes of her works translated – also with Slovenes to whom we want to gradually introduce her other texts.” (Benković in Orzeszkowa 1893: 94) Benković chose Czechs who recognized literary value in the works of Eliza Orzeszkowa as an exemplary model of translating by “brotherly” nations and wanted to present the Polish writer’s work to Slovenes in a similar manner.

Similarly, the Slovenian poet Anton Aškerc (1856–1912) in the postface of Ruske antologije v slovenskih prevodih (Russian Anthology in Slovenian Translations, 1901) that also addressed female poets, said that this anthology was the first attempt to deliver to Slovenian readers Russian poetry in the best possible translations: “Although this is a modest commencement, already these translations allow our compatriots to perceive the image of the Russian poetic genius.” (Ruska 1901: 462) Moreover, Aškerc suggested that other western Slavic literatures should also be translated and provided an explanation for the absence of any translation from southern Slavic languages, such as Croatian or Serbian: “Eventually, a Polish and Czech anthology should be published on the model of the Russian. The Slovenes understand Croatian and Serbian poets in originals.” (Ibid., 462) Aškerc further encouraged the knowledge and dissemination of Russian literature among Slovenian readers: “Russian literature is also our literature and Russian poets are also our poets!” (Ibid., 463, emphasized by Aškerc). In his view, any scholar should read Russian writers in the original language and until then good translations should be available. He arrived at the conclusion that translated literature was a relevant part of any national literature because it connects nations. He pointed out the significance of knowing most prominent Slavic authors in order to get to know ourselves: “It is true that all great writers and poets are international and the Slovenes also have to know them, and it is necessary to know the Slavic leading minds because consequently we also learn about ourselves.” (Ibid., 463–464, emphasized by Aškerc)

However, translations were not always appreciated. Many authors or editors addressed the complexities of translation. For instance, the Slovenian writer Josip Stritar didn’t hesitate to express his indignation of poetry translations when he wrote about his enthusiasm for the Italian poet Ada Negri: “He who speaks Italian, should read her; he who doesn’t should learn enough to be able to read her. Beware of a translation! God save us from translators; ‘traduttore traditore’! The better the poem, the more beware of translation.” (Stritar 1896: 280) In her article about the same Italian poet, the Slovenian woman writer and editor Marica Nadlišek Bartol (1867–1940) wanted a Slovene to translate her poems because “God forbid translating her from German! A translation is worth only half of the original and a translation of a translation – none.” (Nadlišek 1897: 4) She had reservations about a faithful Slovenian translation of Negri’s poems, but nonetheless invited most skilled Slovenian poets with excellent knowledge of Italian to give it a try because their work would be highly appreciated. Both examples demonstrate that people were well aware of the pitfalls of translations, especially of poetry, and the eventual consequences of poor translations for the possibility of truly understanding authors and their works.

Rudolf Andrejka (pseudonym R. Gradovin, 1880–1948) wrote about Slovenian literary translations in his article Nekaj misli in predlogov o našem prevajalnem slovstvu (Some Thoughts and Proposals on Translated Foreign Literature) published in Dom in svet in 1913. Initially he informed the readers that Slovenska matica would organize translations of foreign literature. In his view, some works being translated had no cultural or literary value whatsoever, so he made a list of works that might serve Slovenian editors, to enhance the quality and diversity of foreign literature translated into Slovene, which “considerably lacks good narrative works acknowledged in world literature.” (Gradovin 1913: 115) His proposals included English, French, Italian, Spanish and American writers. Andrejka shared Aškerc’s opinion regarding the lack of Slovenian translations from Croatian and Serbian literature. Regarding German and Scandinavian works, they were usually read translated into German, so he didn’t pay special attention to them. As to other Slav literatures, Andrejka believed it necessary to focus more on Czech literature, among others the novels of Gabriela Preissová. A majority of the proposed works were written by men – other than Preissová, the only two women writers were Eliza Orzeszkowa and Matilde Serao. The article clearly indicated the guidelines of translations into Slovene in the first decades of the 20th century, including lack of interest in translating literature available in German, Croatian or Serbian because for the most part Slovenes could read these works in their originals. On the other hand, better knowledge of other Slav literatures was promoted. Andrejka most likely composed the list of women writers in accordance with the canonization of the time.

The Church also played an extremely important role in the translations of foreign literature. In 1913, the Slovenian theologian and philosopher Aleš Ušeničnik wrote an article on literary translations in which he made reference to Rudolf Andrejka. Ušeničnik argued that other than formal and artistic perspectives, translation also had to consider the aesthetic value and “the general cultural and especially ethical influence of translations.” (Ušeničnik 1913: 157) He reproached Andrejka for not sufficiently considering the general rules of the Church, because in his view, the Church is “the teacher of Christian ethics” (Ibid., 157), and therefore literature one of its concerns; it was the Church that instructed us as to which books should not be read, some even prohibited; of course, a list included all works written by George Sand. Ušeničnik concluded that it would be to people’s benefit to conform to the rules of the Church: “Better less pleasure and be that pure pleasure of truly beautiful art!” (Ibid., 157)

Stand-alone Publications

Translated literary works issued as stand-alone publications were listed in the Slovenian bibliography by Franc Simonič, including books in Slovene printed between 1550 and 1900, and Janko Šlebinger’s bibliography for the period from 1907 to 1912. The intermediate period (1900–1907) was covered by Zbornik znanstvenih in poučnih spisov (Collection of Scientific and Educational Texts) published by Slovenska matica. The majority of translated works listed in the bibliographies were written by the following women writers of Slav origin: Eliška Krásnohorská, Bohumila Klimšová, Ľudmila Podjavorinská, Waleria Morzkowska, Božena Němcová, Anna Řeháková, Gabriela Preissová, Karolína Světlá, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Maria Konopnicka, Marko Vovchok, Eugenia Ribalenko-Kotyrlo, Nadezhda Luhmanova, and Teresa Jadwiga (1843–1906).

Ruska antologija v slovenskih prevodih (Russian Anthology in Slovenian Translations), published in 1901 included eight poets:

- Karolina Pavlova (1810–1894)

- Countess E. K. Osten-Saken29

- Julija Valerianovna Žadovskaja (1824–1883)

- Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaya (1824–1889)

- Anna Pavlovna Barykova (1839–1893)

- Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869–1905)

- Olga Nikolaevna Čjumina (1864–?)

- Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik (1874–1952)

Mirra Lokhvitskaya, with sixteen poems, stood out. Based on her reception in periodicals, Lokhvitskaya was the best known Russian poet among Slovenes. Bosnian writer Milena Mrazović wrote mainly in German. Two stories from her work Selam: Skizzen und Novellen aus dem bosnischen Volksleben (Sketches and Tales of Bosnian Folk Life, 1893) were translated into Slovene in 1895: Abla (Abla) and O nepravem času: iz bosniškega narodnega življenja (At the Wrong Time: from Bosnian Folk Life).

Works staged in Slovenian theatres or their adaptations were of course first translated into Slovene. Afterwards, these translations were published as stand-alone publications:

- Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer: Cvrček (The Cricket, 1877; Die Grille, 1856) and Lowoodska sirota (The Orphan of Lowood, 1877; Die Waise von Lowood,1853);

- Marie Knauff: Kdor se poslednji smeje (He Who Laughs Last, 1883; Wer zuletzt lacht, 1876);

- Adelheid Wette: Janko in Metka (Hansel and Gretel, 1895; Hänsel und Gretel, 1894);

- Božena Viková Kunětická: Starinarica (Collector of Antiquities, 1902; Sběratelka starožitností, 1890);

- Frances Eliza Burnett-Hodgson: Mali lord, 1909 (Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886).

The works by non-Slav women writers were less often translated. The first Slovenian translation of a European woman writer, the novel Elizabeta ali pregnanci v Sibiriji: povest v poduk in kratek čas (Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia, Élisabeth ou les Exilés de Sibérie, 1806) by Sophie Cottin, was published by Mohorjeva družba in 1857. Curious enough, this Slovenian translation was not listed in any of the investigated library catalogues nor mentioned or reviewed in periodicals. However, the French original and German translations were listed in the catalogues of Giontini’s library. It is likely that a Croatian translation from 1848 somehow inspired its translation into Slovene. In 1907, another translation of that same work came out with the title Elizabeta, hči sibirskega jetnika (Elizabeth; the Daughter of a Siberian Prisoner). It was listed in the catalogue of the Public Library of the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District.

In 1864, the Slovenian writer and priest Janez Parapat (1838–1879) translated the novel Družina Alvaredova (The Alvareda Family, La familia de Alvareda, 1849) of the Spanish writer Fernán Caballero. This work was not listed in any of the library catalogues either. Its German translation (Die Familie Alvareda) was found in Giontini’s catalogue from 1861, which included her collected works Spanische Novellen (Spanish Novels).30 Parapat also translated some fairy tales by Caballero that he published in periodicals.31 Based on research findings, the reception of Spanish women writers in the territory of Slovenia was negligible, making this example all the more intriguing.

Kristusove legende (Christ Legends, Kristuslegender, 1904) by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf was published in the series Ljudska knjižnica (Popular Library) with no mention of the author. In 1900, Slovenec published a positive review32 of this work. Although the research is focused on European women writers, we should mention two American writers whose works are listed in Slovenian bibliographies: Maria Susanna Cummins (1827–1866) with Prižigalec (The Lamplighter, 1877; 1854) and Mabel Vaughan (1887, 1857); and Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811–1896) with two translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): Stric Tomaž ali življenje zamorcov v Ameriki (Uncle Tom or Negro Life in America) and Stric Tomova koča ali življenje zamorcov v robnih deržavah svobodne séverne Amerike (Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Negro Life in the Slave States of Free North America). The first translation, published in Klagenfurt, was by the priest Janez Božič (1829–1884), and the second, published in Ljubljana,33 was translated by the Slovenian writer and translator Franc Malavašič (1818–1863). They both came out in 1853, only a year after the publication of the original. Moreover, Malavašič translated it into Slovene from the German translation that also came out in 1853. It’s not a coincidence that the book had simultaneous Slovenian translations. In fact, after the revolutions in 1848 the subject of slavery was topical in Slovenian lands because of their oppression suffered during the Habsburg Monarchy. Although the American novel tackles direct slavery, the desire to be free and equal is a common denominator. Simonič’s Slovenian bibliography had listed under 1887 the work Ljudmila translated by the Slovenian writer Janko Leban (1855–1932). There is no mention of the author but a note34 in Slovene indicates that the original in German was written by a woman. Ljubljanski zvon published a short review of the novel, saying that it will delight all friends of the sentimental novel. The translator is advised to tackle a more serious story next time.35

In 1875, Slovenski narod anticipated the publication of Valentina (Valentine, 1832) written by George Sand and translated by Davorin Hostnik (1853–1927) in Slovenska knjižnica (Slovenian Library). Although the book got to the pre-press stage it was never printed, most likely due to financial problems. (Kersnik 1949: 303)

Serialised Publications in Periodicals

Many Slovenian translations of European women writers, mainly of short stories, fairy tales and poems, were published in periodicals. Again, it was predominantly the works of Slavic writers, including Gabriela Preissová, Marko Vovchok, Mariya Krestovskaya (1862–1910), Irma Geisslová (1855–1914), Anna Řeháková, Maria Konopnicka, Karolína Světlá, Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942), Maria Walewska (1882–1940), Vilma Sokolová (1859–1941), Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Božena Němcová.

In addition to these twelve writers of Slavic origin, thirteen women writers from other parts of Europe were translated and published. Besides The Alvareda Family, Janez Paparat translated six short texts by the Spanish Fernán Caballero that were published in the 1860s: La flor del Lililá (The Flower of Lililá) was published in Slovenska lipa (Slovenian Linden) in 1850, Teta Holofernes in njen zet (The Devil’s Mother-in Law, La suegra del diablo, 1859) in Slovenski glasnik in 1864, Poslednja tolažba (The last Consolation) in Slovenske večernice (Slovenian Evenings Stars) in 1867, and Janez soldat (Juan the Soldier, Juan Soldado, 1859), Janez Vsegadost in smrt (Juan Holgado and the Death, Juan Holgado y la muerte, 1850) and Verne duše (Souls, Las ánimas, 1859) were published in Besednik (Orator) in 1869.

The novel Lady Hilda (In a Winter City, 1876) by the English writer Ouida was published in Slovenski narod in 1894. The Slovenian translation was supposedly based on the homonymous Croatian translation that was anticipated by Ljubljanski zvon and was also available to Slovenian readers.36

Periodicals also published five Swedish women writers: in 1910, two short stories by the children’s author Helene Nyblom (1843–1926): Ko je priplul parnik k skalnatemu otoku (When the Steamer Reached the Rocky Island) in Straža (The Guard)37 and Nevesta gorskega duha (The Bride of the Mountain Ghost) in Ameriški Slovenec (The American Slovene).38 They were both Catholic papers, which is a telling piece of information because the writer converted to Roman Catholicism in 1895. Selma Lagerlöf’s Cezarjeva vizija (The Emperor’s Vision, Kejsarens syn, 1904) was published in Slovenec in 1904, Zvezda pada (The Falling Star) by Sophie Elkan (1853–1921) in Slovenski narod in 1902, Sopotnici (Female Fellow Travellers) by Elisabeth Kuylenstierna (1869–1933) also in Slovenski narod in 1903, and Pogum (Courage) by Ellen Key was published by Omladina (Youth) in 1904.

Other translations of prose included: Valček iz Fausta (The Waltz from Faust) by Julie d’Assenai39 published in Slovenski list in 1902; Hvaležni črnec (The Grateful Negro, 1804) by Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) in Mir40 in 1912. The same year, Naša moč (Our Strength)41 published Don Evèno (1898) written by the Italian Grazia Deledda. Other works published by Naša moč included: Molčeča priča (Silent Witness) by Margaret Strickland (c.1880–1970) in 1913, Mati prepodi tigra (Mother Chases Away the Tiger) by Irma Blood and Obleganje Pariza (Siege of Paris) by Sara Bernard in 1914.42

Poems by Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) and Ada Negri were also translated and published, Negri mainly because of her social commitment. The translator of her poem Brez dela (Unemployed) only signed the initials Ž. L. M., but based on the form of the verb in Slovene it was a man. The translator of Prisilna selitev (Forced Migration) also wanted to remain anonymous and signed with three asterisks, though the poem’s translation published in Žena in dom in 1932 indicates it was the Slovenian poet Alojz Gradnik (1882–1967).43 (Toroš 2010: 363) According to Ana Toroš, Gradnik’s translations of Ada Negri’s poems were first published in 1913 (Prisilna selitev).44 (Ibid., 363) After that year, they regularly came out until the beginning of World War Two (Ibid., 363), but this was the only Gradnik translation published before 1918. The poem Požar v jami (The Fire in a Cave) was translated by the Slovenian sociologist, writer and publicist Janez Evangelist Krek (1865–1917), whose main interest were works addressing the problems of the working class. All the above-mentioned poems published in Naša moč were translated by Krek.

The Slovenian writer Pavlina Pajk wrote an obituary of the Empress Elisabeth (1837–1898)45 in which she also discussed her literary work. She published some of Empress Elisabeth’s poems in the German original and some in her Slovenian translations. The first poem she translated didn’t have a title.46 The Empress supposedly dedicated it to the statue of the Virgin Mary in Bad Ischl in 1885. The other two poems (another with no title47 and Odpoved (Renunciation, Verzicht)) were published in the Austrian paper Neues Wiener Tagblatt.

Literary works by foreign women writers were only translated into Slovene after the revolutions of 1848. The first was Uncle’s Tom Cabin by the American Harriet Beecher-Stowe in 1853, followed by Sophie Cottin’s in 1857, Božena Němcová’s in 1862 and Fernán Caballero’s in 1864. Despite this initial national variety of authors whose works were translated, by the last decade of the 19th and early 20th century the interest in women writers of Slavic origin, in particular Czech, Polish and Russian, increased. This was closely related to the national movement from the second half of the 19th century which instigated and promoted various cultural activities tackling national topics. Nonetheless, works by non-Slavic authors already acknowledged and read in Europe, were also translated, for instance Selma Lagerlöf and Fernán Caballero. Some works were translated and adapted to be staged in Slovenian theatres, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s adaptations being the most popular.

The selection of women writers whose translated works were published in periodicals was quite similar to that of stand-alone publications: for the most part it was writers of Slav origin of which Marko Vovchok deserves special mention. Other renowned authors included Maria Edgeworth, Ouida, Selma Lagerlöf, Ellen Key and Fernán Caballero. The most frequently translated poet was Ada Negri whose social poetry fascinated Alojz Gradnik and Janez Evangelist Krek. Pavlina Pajk was intrigued by the Austrian Empress Elisabeth’s poetry and translated three of her poems.

The national movement played a key role in encouraging Slovenian intellectuals to translate foreign works, mainly of Slav origin. It should be noted, though, that the scarcity of translations from German, Croatian and Serbian can be attributed to the widespread knowledge of the local population of these languages which allowed them to read the works in the original.

Reception of European Women Writers in Slovenian Literary Works

The specific development of Slovenian literature as a “small” literature was often related to its connections and dependence on foreign literatures, as was addressed in the introduction. The reception of foreign women writers in Slovenian literary works was already discussed by Katarina Bogataj-Gradišnik in her work Sentimentalni roman (Sentimental Novel, 1984). Slovenian writers, in particular women writers Luiza Pesjak and Pavlina Pajk supposedly followed the example of their English and French role models, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Sand. (Bogataj-Gradišnik 1984: 141) According to Miran Hladnik, the Slovenian women’s novel adopted in particular the German narrative pattern most likely following the example of Eugenie Marlitt. In fact, both writers were accused of plagiarism of her works in their lifetime. The relation between the German writer and Pavlina Pajk was highlighted by Katja Mihurko Poniž in her study on Pajk’s novel Arabela. (Mihurko 2011)

Based on research findings, European women writers were well-received among Slovenian men and women writers, which is demonstrated by various quotes, names and works of foreign authors used in Slovenian literary works. Although a direct literary influence of European women writers cannot be substantiated with evidence, we may allow the possibility that Slovenian writers were inspired by their works. Indeed, such is testified by explicit evidence, such as articles and reviews in newspapers, notes and comments in notebooks and diaries of Slovenian writers, discussions in their correspondence, translations of foreign literary works and certain intertextuality connections.

George Sand

George Sand stirred up a lot of interest among Slovenian writers: she was often mentioned and quoted in their literary works. This is most evident in texts written by Pavlina Pajk and Josip Jurčič, in which we can find many intertextual connections with Sand’s works. Pavlina Pajk first presented the work and life of this French writer to Slovenian readers in an obituary published in Zora in 1876. This furthered a more detailed analysis of works by both writers which demonstrated that on top of following the pattern of the sentimental novel, there were a number of similarities such as intertextual elements – similar motifs, setting, names of protagonists and words. (Badalič 2013) These were most evident in the following pairs of works: Le marquis de Villemer (1860) and Slučaji usode (Chances of Fate), 1897) as well as Blagodejna zvezdica (Beneficient Star, 1881); La petite Fadette (The Little Fadette, 1849) and Judita (1896); and François le Champi (Francis the Waif, 1847) and Najdenec (Foundling, 1894). Josip Jurčič and Josip Stritar were also familiar with George Sand’s works which influenced mainly Jurčič’s Lepa Vida (Beautiful Vida, 1877). (Pogačnik 1988: 81–83) However, Jurčič highly disapproved of the motif of marital infidelity in the works of the French writer. (Mihurko Poniž & Badalič 2012: 85) In the 12th chapter of Rokovnjači (Bandits, 1881) finished by Janko Kersnik after Jurčič passed away, we find the quote from the prologue of Sand’s novel François le Champi (1850): “If I make a farmer speak the way we speak, he becomes a fictitious thing who needs to be given ideas he does not have.” (Jurčič 1967: 167) Josip Stritar, who was an eager advocate of the sentimental novel, set in his work Zona and in the review of Slovenian translation of Župnik Wakefieldski (The Vicar of Wakefield) the French writer as a model. (Stritar 1955: 346 and 1956: 239)

Quotations, Paraphrases, Works and Names of Other European Women Writers in Slovenian Literary Works

Names and works by European women writers were mentioned in Slovenian literary works on many occasions. In addition, Slovenian men and women writers sometimes used their quotations or paraphrases in their own works. For instance, the name of the German writer Eugenie Marlitt can be found in several works, including Pisma (Letters) and Študentke (Female Students) written by Zofka Kveder, Sama svoja (Her Own) by Fran Govekar (1871–1949), Ciklamen (Cyclamen) by Janko Kersnik and various works by Ivan Cankar. (Mihurko Poniž 2011: 73–74)

The French language writer of Swiss origin, Madame de Staël, was also mentioned in Josip Stritar’s Zona. He read her works De l’ Allemagne and Corinne but didn’t like them at all and compared his disapproval with Napoleon’s who couldn’t stand her either. (Stritar 1955: 335) The novel Corinne was also mentioned in the short story Na Žovneku (At Žovnek) by Valentin Korun (1865–1940) which was published in Ljubljanski zvon in 1913. The heroine of the story holds in her hands the recently published novel Corinne ou l’ Italie by the French writer Madame de Staël. The narrator explicitly points out that the protagonist reads the novel with interest for the second time. (Korun 1913: 23)

The Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf was rather extensively paraphrased in Magda (1907), a short story by Milan Pugelj (1883–1929). The main character Ana tells a story about a young and wealthy Oton Jug she used to be in love with, and the courtesan Magda. She has a hunch and says: “The Swedish woman writer Selma Lagerlöf says somewhere that young, innocent, and unhappy people already feel all the difficult occurrences when they are approaching. And at that time I was young, innocent, and unhappy, and probably this was the cause of my having a premonition in my dreams and in my thoughts of something obscure and very tragic.” (Pugelj 1907: 429)

The novel Aus guter Familie (From a Good Family, 1895) by the German Gabriele Reuter (1859–1941) was mentioned in Študentke by Zofka Kveder. (Mihurko Poniž 2003: 76) The novel probably had an influence on her other stories in which we can find similar motifs. (Ibid., 116)

Similarly, the novel Graf von Benjowski (1865) by Luise Mühlbach appeared in the short story Milan (1891); one of Milan’s favourite books, which indicates the protagonist’s tendency to daydreaming and even makes him cry, is this novel. (Fr. d. P. Ž-ć. 1891: 2) Ivan Tavčar (1851–1923) used the quotation in German by the Austrian writer Ada Christen (1839–1901) at the beginning of his short story Soror Pia (1879): “Die Welt ist so gross – Leicht kann sich verbergen ein glückloses Weib (The world is so big – a hapless woman can hide without problems).” (Tavčar 1952: 125) The quotation reflects the fate of the heroine.

In his autobiographical work Moje življenje (My Life, 1905/1906), Janez Trdina (1830–1905) wrote that he read all the works by the Austrian writer Caroline Pichler whom he considered one of the best Austrian-German women writers. He found her style poetic and the language beautiful and natural. His favourites were Pichler’s historical novels. He added that the writer “remained his sweet soul friend.” (Trdina 1905: 655)

Due to her anti-feminist ideas, the German-Baltic writer Laura Marholm was mentioned in Slovenian periodicals several times, in particular in Slovenka, published in Trieste. (Badalič 2014: 167) Nonetheless, Zofka Kveder used a quotation from her work Das Buch der Frauen (1895) at the beginning of her collections of short stories Misterij žene (The Mystery of a Woman, 1900). The Slovenian writer chose Marholm’s quotation as the motto of her collection although the latter wasn’t considered a progressive author. (Mihurko Poniž in Kveder 2005: 503) Another example of intertextuality is the children’s poem L’hirondelle (The Swallow), attributed to the French writer Adélaïde de Montgolfier (1789–1880) that Luiza Pesjak incorporated in her Beatin dnevnik (Beata’s Diary, 1887). She left it in the original and ingeniously adapted it to the context of the story. It would appear that Pesjak was also inspired by French literature and not only German, as is the common accusation.

Influence of European Women Writers on Slovenian Writers: Similarities between Foreign and Slovenian Literary Works

European women writers seemed to have inspired Slovenian authors, both men and women, and their influence in Slovenian literary works can mainly be identified in terms of content. Some authors were accused of foreign influences already in their lifetime. Viktor Bežek (1860–1920), the editor of Ljubljanski zvon, addressed this subject as early as in 1897 in his article on plagiarism, listing some cases of similarity between foreign and Slovenian works. These included poems by Simon Gregorčič (1844–1906) and Anton Aškerc. Gregorčič’s Človeka nikar! (Spare the Man!, 1877) was supposedly a translation of a poem by the Austrian Betty Paoli (1814–1894), but Bežek didn’t provide its original title. (Bežek 1897: 294) France Koblar (1889–1975), who studied Gregorčič’s life and work, drew parallels between Človeka nikar! and Wenn ich dereinst entrückt dem Lebenslande (When I One Day Retire From Life) from Paoli’s collection Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1850). (Koblar 1962: 401) However, he argued that there was a fundamental difference in the perspective of both authors: Betty Paoli’s pessimism had nothing to do with religious feelings, while Gregorčič’s originated from Catholic idealism. (Ibid., 220)

In his article, Bežek also discussed Delavčeva pesem o premogu (Coal Miner’s Poem, 1897) written by Anton Aškerc. According to a certain E. L., it is suspiciously similar to Ada Negri’s poem about coal miners. Bežek took Aškerc’s side saying that “two investigating the same life or similar social movement might come to similar conclusions.” (Bežek 1897: 350) In his letters to Fran Govekar, Aškerc himself rejected the accusations: he knew the Italian writer from the German magazine Neue Zeit, but his knowledge of Italian could never have allowed him to read her poems in the original. (Govekar 1912: 246) Tone Smolej asserts that Aškerc in fact didn’t read Negri’s poetry in Italian, though he should have known her work because of the review of the collection Tempeste (Tempests, 1896) published in Neue Zeit which included translated fragments, among others, from the poem L’incendio della miniera (The Fire of the Mine) which supposedly influenced Aškerc’s work. (Smolej 2007: 123)

Similarities between foreign and Slovenian works can also be found in other men and women writers. Most intertextual connections were identified in relation to works by George Sand and Pavlina Pajk, as discussed in the subchapter on the reception of George Sand. Similarities in content were also noted between some Slovenian works and those by the Czech writer Božena Němcová, who owed her popularity in Slovenian lands in particular to Babica (The Grandmother, Babička, 1855) and Češke pravljice (Czech Fairy Tales, Národní báchorky a pověsti, 1845). Despite the absence of solid evidence on her influence on Slovenian writers, we found similarities in terms of content in the poem Babica (The Grandmother) by Luiza Pesjak, published in Kres (Bonfire) in 1883. In the poem, the grandmother yearns for the grandchild she has never seen. She imagines what they would do together through all four seasons and especially at Christmas. The grandmother of the Czech writer actually lives the dreams of her Slovenian counterpart; she spends all seasons with her grandchildren and finds particular delight in the Christmas holidays. Božena Němcová supposedly also had influence on Josipina Turnograjska. In fact, Sabina Žnidaršič Žagar points to the eventual impact of Němcová’s fairy tales on the tale Rožmanova Lenčica (Rožman’s Lenčica, 1853):

[Rožman’s Lenčica] is a peculiarity in her (known) prose because the author takes up the adaptation of a folk theme for the first time. She subtitled the tale ‘after a folk tale’. The tale is (probably) a transition in her interest – which was thus far mainly focused on topics from Slav history – to folklore. This might also indicate the influence of the Czech woman writer Božena Němcová – at the time already popular in our country – whose poems and adaptations tackled motifs of Czech and Slovak fairy tales. (Žnidaršič Žagar 2009: 130)

Fran Govekar drew attention to the supposed influence of Němcová’s fairy tales on Fran Levstik (1831–1887). In the review of Slovenian translation of Czech fairy tales, Govekar claimed that the central part of O třech zakletých psích (On Three Enchanted Dogs) very much resembled Levstik’s Martin Krpan (1858). (Govekar 1912: 317) Govekar probably referred to the motif of a king who promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever killed the monster and saved the kingdom. However, this is a recurring motif in fairy tales so it is difficult to support the notion that Levstik took it from Němcová.

Similarities in content were also identified between the works of the French writer Sophie Cottin and the Slovene Pavlina Pajk. Although no explicit mention of the French writer has been found in any Slovenian literary work or correspondence, based on the reception of her works in library catalogues it may be assumed that she was popular among readers. (Badalič 2014) Katarina Bogataj Gradišnik discusses the eventual influence of Sophie Cottin on Pavlina Pajk in that Malvina, the protagonist of Slučaji usode (Chances of Fate, 1897), is named after the novel Malvina (1800). Moreover, the novels share several motifs. (Mihurko Poniž & Badalič 2012) Intertextual connections can also be found between Cottin’s Claire d’ Albe (1798) and Pajk’s Dušne borbe (The Struggles of the Soul, 1896). They both tell a story about a young, beautiful and virtuous woman who has married an older man to please her father. Tranquil matrimonial life is disrupted with the arrival of a young relative of her husband whom the heroine falls in love with, subsequently fighting her feelings in the name of virtue till the end of the book.

According to Katarina Bogataj Gradišnik, Charlotte Brontë was another possible influence of Slovenian men and women writers. Her novel Jane Eyre (1847) or, better yet, its theatre adaptation Die Waise von Lowood (The Orphan of Lowood, 1853) by the German Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer was well received in Slovenian territory. Similarities are evident especially in the following works: Blagodejna zvezdica (Beneficient Star, 1881), Mačeha (Stepmother, 1882) and Slučaji usode by Pavlina Pajk, and Beatin dnevnik by Luiza Pesjak. (Bogataj Gradišnik 1984: 142) The motif of a madwoman in the attic from the novel Jane Eyre can also be found in Arabela by Pavlina Pajk. (Mihurko Poniž 2011: 76)

Pavlina Pajk’s works, in particular Roka in srce (Hand and Heart, 1883) and Planinska idila (Mountain Idyll, 1895) as well as Beatin dnevnik by Luiza Pesjak were accused of plagiarising Eugenie Marlitt’s work. (Mihurko Poniž 2011: 72–75) However, Marlitt was not mentioned in the work or correspondence of both Slovenian writers, so this is more speculative than anything. (Ibid., 75) In all likelihood, similarities are mainly due to genre conventions, while similar motifs (for instance a madwoman in the attic) may or may not be related to the works of other European women writers such as Charlotte Brontë or George Sand. Consequently, it cannot be maintained that Pajk was influenced only by that particular German writer. (Ibid., 76, 78) The same holds true for Luiza Pesjak. Although Eugenie Marlitt was very well received in Slovenian territory, her name is most often related to inferior literature – probably due to the clear depreciation of her work in Germany during the 1880s. (Ibid., 71–74)

Influence of Greek Metrics on Slovenian Poetry

In his article on the influence of Greek poets on the metrics of the Slovenian poet France Prešeren (1800–1849), in particular his poem Nezakonska mati (The Unmarried Mother, 1843), Franc Omerza (1885–1940) argued that contrary to the common belief that Prešeren only read Latin classics, he also drew inspiration from ancient Greek poetry. Omerza compared the metrics of Corinna’s poetry (6th century BC) and Prešeren’s poems and discovered many similarities. According to Omerza, a number of his other poems, for instance Ženska zvestoba (Female Fidelity, 1839), Pevcu (To a Poet, 1838), etc., followed the same metrics, indicating Greek influence. (Omerza 1916: 218–219)

Below the title Oda spominu Franca Plemelna (Ode to the Memory of Franc Plemel, 1852), an anonymous Slovenian author wrote it was written in Sappho’s (6th/7th century AD) metrics. (P. Š. 1852: 244) Sappho was also mentioned in two literary works by Josip Stritar: Klara (1880) and Apostrof. Ljubezen (Apostrophe. Love, 1876). France Prešeren as well mentioned the Greek poet in a poem written in German that he dedicated to Luiza Pesjak, An eine junge Dichterin (To a Young Poet,1844). In fact, Prešeren suggested that Pesjak should join Sappho’s guild if she was passionate about writing poems. (Prešeren 1844: 211)

The question about supposed similarities of Slovenian literary works to those of foreign writers was addressed in periodicals in the late 19th century. In addition to men writers, some women writers were also mentioned. Slovenian authors mentioned, paraphrased and quoted foreign women writers in their works and notes which indicates the important role of foreign writers in the creation of new literary works. Quotations of George Sand, Laura Marholm, Madame de Staël, or a paraphrase of Selma Lagerlöf, included in Slovenian texts, highlight the significance of foreign literary influences on Slovenian literature. Although for the most part only the name of a foreign woman writer or the title of her work is mentioned in a Slovenian text, this is a telling piece of information, not randomly chosen, conveying a particular idea or even a connection between works. Such are the cases of Eugenie Marlitt, Madame de Staël, Sappho, Luise Mühlbach, Caroline Pichler and Gabriele Reuter.

It should also be considered that the genre of the sentimental novel that women writers generally followed, has recurring – and similar – motifs that spread to various parts of Europe. Moreover, when there is no mention of the name in the text, the influence of particular woman writer is difficult to ascertain. For instance, the works by George Sand, Eugenie Marlitt, Charlotte Brontë and Sophie Cottin have a lot in common with the texts by Pavlina Pajk and Luiza Pesjak, but foreign influence on Slovenian women writers can only be assumed. The influence of metrics by the ancient Greek poets Corinne and Sappho has also been noted in Slovenian poetry. Anton Aškerc and Simon Gregorčič were accused of plagiarising of Ada Negri and Betty Paoli, though neither case is convincing.

We can conclude that Slovenian literature was closely connected – not only through men but also women writers – with European literary currents from which it took ideas, transforming them in accordance with contemporary Slovenian culture.

Ambiguous Views on Femininity in the Writings of Two “New Women” in the Fin de siècle: Zofka Kveder’s Inspirational Encounters with Laura Marholm’s Modern women

Katja Mihurko Poniž

What happens to cultural products that travel through time or space to emerge in new contexts and configurations? How do they set in motion – imaginatively as well as geographically – people who encounter them and, in turn, are set loose themselves?

(Stephen Greenblatt: Cultural mobility: an introduction)

Feminist versions of New Historicism allow the recovery of women’s texts with the selective enhancement of only historical evidence which colors the reader’s response with presentist concerns. To learn political lessons from the past we need to have it in black and white.

(Jane Marcus: The Asylum of Anteus)

In March 1900, Zofka Kveder (1878–1926), a young Slovenian writer, publishes her first book in Prague. Misterij žene (The Mystery of a Woman) is a collection of short stories, modernist sketches which she accompanied with a motto from Laura Marholm’s work Das Buch der Frauen (1894, Modern Women).

Zofka Kveder: Misterij žene. Photo: Katja Mihurko Poniž.

Zofka Kveder is a feminist par excellence: she came to Prague from Munich, where she spent two months. She arrived to the Bavarian capital from Tessin, where she spent her Christmas holidays on account of an invite that came from a female editor of a Swiss women’s magazine. She tried to study in Switzerland, she successfully passed her interview with the University’s Chancellor in Bern, but could not go through with her studies because of inadequate financial means. Ever since her first job in the small town of Kočevje and later on in Ljubljana and in Trieste, she supported herself with her writing. She was the author of feminist texts and a socially critical observer of her society. If she felt it was necessary, she put on a man’s suit, so “male” spaces could be at her reach, she smoked cigarettes, wore short hair, rode a bicycle, and had an affair with a Croatian decadent poet Vladimir Jelovšek. How is it possible that she chose as the motto of her first book the words of an author that was described by German feminists as the enemy of the women’s movement, the flag bearer of reactionism? At the same time, her Slovene male and female contemporaries unequivocally rejected Marholm in the magazine Slovenka (A Slovene Woman), which published several literary texts and feminist articles by Zofka Kveder. The answer seems a bit more reachable and logical if we compare the thoughts of Laura Marholm on the fulfilled love life of a female intellectual or a female artist with Zofka Kveder’s quote in her work Študentke (Female Students): “Heart or mind! It’s hard to choose.”48 These words reveals that the Slovene writer was dealing with the question of how much femininity and love the new woman, a woman who already achieved her independence through education, is allowed to and capable of showing.49

In order to find a satisfactory answer to the question why Laura Marholm inspired Zofka Kveder, we need to delve into the times when both of these women created and get a grasp of a large historical perspective, thus following the findings of new historicism which state that by reading a historical period “we cannot only focus on that which has been canonized, as that which has been canonized was subjugated to the interest of the power circles and doesn’t include all the reality; therefore, we need dig underneath crevices and beyond margins and search for tiny, sometimes barely visible indicators that cause this ideologically tainted picture of a selected era to change.”50

It seems that by adopting the approaches of new historicism, we can create a good starting point for a different kind of reading of Laura Marholm’s work, and consequently, our understanding of Kveder’s stance towards Marholm, since in their works both authors intensely reacted to the historical moment in which they lived.

New historicism believes in the reciprocity of literature and history (Simonis 2004: 155) and, at the same time, constructs a historical context in which a particular literary work was created in a detailed way, as well as searches for connections between non-literary and literary works (e.g., Greenblatt’s study Shakespeare and the Exorcists, 1988, in which he connects Shakespeare’s king Lear with a text on exorcism by Samuel Harsnett called Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures). We are talking about the so called “cross cultural montage”, an approach that wasn’t discovered by new historicism, but had been known before in the field of women’s historical studies. (Lowder Newton 1994: 152) In terms of women’s studies and gender studies, the principles of new historicism can be problematic as they don’t take sufficient account of the historical facts regarding the situation of women. New historicism is not interested in that which exists outside the discourse and thus remains captured within the borders of the patriarchal logic. Since women aren’t part of this discourse, it can happen that they don’t make it into the sphere of scientific research (Simonis 2004: 168), however, newer studies, mainly in the field of cultural mobility, also include women. Following Jane Marcus’s thoughts in her excellent study about the suffragette movement published in Veeser’s volume on new historicism, we can say that the new historicism’s feminist revision of women’s texts from a selected historical point of view is similar to the introduction of colouring in black and white films, namely, it is used to make them more approachable for the contemporary viewer. As J. Marcus points out, feminist versions of new historicism enable us to rediscover women’s texts. However, the reader’s reaction is dependent on the views and knowledge available in his/her time. Jane Marcus also stresses that in order to learn a political lesson from the past, we need to go back to the black and white original (Marcus 1994: 132), meaning that we need dig deep into the particularities and characteristics of the select era and try to understand the dimensions the original had at the time of its creation but may have been lost from our radar later on.

For new historicism, an interesting starting point for research comes from non-textual sources. In his study Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (1986), Joe Fineman develops his theory also on the basis of the Rainbow portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. In the painting, the Queen is wearing a dress patterned with ears, eyes and lips. Fineman connects this with Shakespeare’s sonnet innovation, his new language which is no longer unambiguously visual, but ambiguously verbal. 51 Jane Marcus sees her study on the suffragette posters and the images of women during WW I as contrary to the feminist versions of new historicism, even though she also bases her study on the image but, at the same time, she analyses in great detail the historical situation of violence against women which is reflected in the literary texts of the female authors who wrote about WW I, as well as on suffragette posters. These are more than just documents of the fierce battle for the voting right – namely, they feature different types of women – from a heroic warrior, inspired by Joan of Arc, to a feminine suffragette that reminds one of the Pre-Raphaelite female portraits and thus tells a new story of the relation between women and war. Using her research of the posters, Jane Marcus develops a theory of feminist fetishism (she draws on Naomi Schor) and of travesty that enables the exchange of female identities and got a new life within the suffragette movement. Therefore, historical approach to literary texts cannot limit itself to one view only, rather, it has to incorporate as broad a view as possible, even when comparing various texts.

Viewed in this light, we can find an interesting non-textual starting point for understanding the literary work of Zofka Kveder before WW I in Slovenia in the caricature by Hinko Smrekar (1883–1942), called Slovenski literati (Slovene Writers) (1913), which features Zofka Kveder holding a burning gingerbread (?)52 heart in her hand.53

Hinko Smrekar: Slovenski literati (1913). Source: National and University Library Ljubljana.

We don’t see a portrait, but a caricature and, as Karl Dobida writes in his essay on Hinko Smrekar, a caricature calls for the author’s profound artistic sensibility, a shrewd point of view, unambiguous life stance and values, as well as a broad perspective on life and a good taste. Most importantly, a caricaturist needs to be honest, relentless and uncompromising in his search of the truth. (Dobida 1957: 19)

In his caricature, Hinko Smrekar obviously captured that which best represented Zofka Kveder, her literary texts and her life stance. Smrekar’s caricatures are such that they don’t show violent deformations and rigid stylizations or decoratively unified exaggerations: “It is enough for him to only slightly modify, gently exposes certain characteristics and thus already achieves the desired effect, complemented with a bunch of descriptive details. He sometimes goes a bit too far doing that, making a lot of the caricatures that are not supported by a verbal commentary unclear or even unintelligible.”54

The heart, of course, is not an attribute that would, at first sight, point to Zofka Kveder’s feminist and emancipatory engagement which marked her entry into the Slovene literary history. A burning heart can be found in Catholic iconography where Jesus’s heart is on fire because of his love for mankind. It is obvious that Zofka Kveder’s image during her time was connected with the notion of love and attitude towards love, however, the question arises whether that is because she is the only woman in the caricature and metonymically represents women’s writing, 55 or because the heart/ love is that which supposedly marked her as a person and/or literary artist the most. In any case, caricature denotes a starting point for a reflection on these questions and, at the same time, remains a document of the time in which it was created.

Our study will be based on the question how the fin de siècle discourse on gender thematized and problematized traditional attributes of femininity (among them, mostly a relation towards love), and what were Laura Marholm’s (in her work Modern Women) and Zofka Kveder’s (in her prose) reactions to these issues. We will attempt to show how individual texts articulated oscillation between women’s sexual/love drive and feminist engagement that presupposed new images of femininity. These new views on femininity mostly marginalized the relationship between a man and a woman, or understood it as a relationship in which a woman must deny its emancipatory potential. Laura Marholm’s text Modern Women will be used as a text that intensely dissects women’s feelings of being divided between the two sexes. After publication, this work received a lot of attention and has never been entirely forgotten (Cf., Scott, 1980; Brantly, 1991; Witt-Bratström, 2007; Hetzkova, 2010). Nevertheless, no extensive studies on it exist, even though it has been a very influential book. However, that is not because of the qualities that are recognized as significant from a contemporary point of view, but because of an ambiguous relationship of the author to the depicted topic. We would like to prove that it is precisely this ambiguity that connects the sensitive female representatives of that time – apart from Laura Marholm and Zofka Kveder, many artists that are introduced in Modern Women belong to this group. One of the often times overlooked qualities of Modern Women is its exposing of the question of the imprints of sexual identity in artistic creations. Ebba Witt-Brattström sees Modern Women as a precursor of gynocriticism. (Witt-Brattström 2007: 151)56

Comparing the work Modern Women with The Mystery of a Woman and some other texts by Zofka Kveder, shows that Laura Marholm was a writer who in Modern Women used a special approach to argumentation that evades the traditional gender discourse, therefore, the book was considered as different and innovative only by few in Marholm’s time, and consequently, they extracted from it only that which was in line with their views, while missing the complexity of the book. Zofka Kveder was surely a different type of a reader and her reception of Laura Marholm reveals a possibility of a different reading and at the same time points to the fact that the reception of this Baltic-Scandinavian author wasn’t as unambiguous as we’ve thought so far. The book Modern Women was created as a direct response to the Zeitgeist and the social situation at the end of the century, therefore, in order to understand the context in which it was created it is essential to introduce the specific historical background.

As Eric Hobsbawm states, “a change in the social position and expectations of women became obvious in the last decades of the nineteenth century”. (Hobsbawm 1987: 201) The lives of many women were radically changed as soon as certain public spheres became available to them; they were able to enter those places as employees. The possibility to support themselves somewhat lessened their complete dependence on their husbands or their primary families. The question of subordination and exclusion from the public life where decisions get made – also decisions that bear importance to women specifically – had been relevant for their predecessors as well, however, it was that generation that started talking about it in the public sphere and made it available also outside small, private circles. Still, it was not only the developing industrialization which was calling for women’s work force that influenced the entry of women into the public sphere. (Ibid., 245) Because of such liberalization tendencies, elementary education started to gain its momentum, and as the number of elementary schools grew, the need for (female) teachers also grew. (Ibid., 245) This, in consequence, caused the thriving of secondary school education for women. (Ibid., 248) In the field of economy which was becoming more or more masculinized (Ibid., 244) there was no room for women anymore, as the rule was that “the employed” was the one who got “an official income”, and most women thus fell under the category of unpaid work (Ibid., 244). Hobsbawm also states: “We can see nineteenth-century industrialization – using the word in the widest sense – as a process which tended to extrude women, and particularly married women, from the economy officially defined as such, namely that in which only those who received an individual cash income counted as ‘occupied’: the sort of economics which included the earnings of prostitutes in the ‘national income’, at least in theory, but not equivalent but unpaid conjugal or extra-conjugal activities of other women, or which counted paid servants as ‘occupied’ but unpaid domestic work as ‘unoccupied’. (Ibid.,199)

New professions for women appeared though: they could become shop assistants, lower level clerks at banks and post offices, in Britain, they could even become journalists, but mostly women went into teaching. Looking for jobs for daughters from bourgeois families also stemmed from the need for those women to take care of themselves since their parents could not assure them a solid life standard anymore. Once employed, those women – due to the growing consumerist economy – became the main target of the capitalist market (Hobsbawm 1987: 203), which saw in them a precious buying force, and addressed them accordingly (Ibid.), and, at the same time, encouraged their employment possibilities. Financial independence enable them to have greater freedom “both in their own right as individuals and in their relations with men” (Ibid. 204), and moved away from “the twilight or lamplit cocoon of the bourgeois interior” (Ibid. 205). They could go out to the streets without chaperons, rode their bikes along forest paths, replaced corsets with dresses which didn’t make them feel confined. They started getting formal education in the academic world, including at the universities.

Women’s emancipation movement in the 19th century was, as Hobsbawm explains, a complex process that caused a surprising change in the position and aspiration of women (mostly bourgeois women) (Ibid.: 248), but it is at the same time hard to identify the degree to which emancipation influenced those women’s sexual freedom: “Sex without marriage was certainly still confined to a minority of consciously emancipated girls of this class, almost certainly also seeking other expressions of liberation, political or otherwise.” (Ibid., 205) This was extremely hard, considering the complete masculinization of politics (Ibid., 200). Fighters for women’s rights turned their views about their subjugated position into emancipatory demands and started voicing those demands not only individually but also as members of associations and other forms of communal strives, as much as the laws in various European countries allowed them, of course. There were some men out there who supported women’s rights, however, as Hobsbawm notes, they mostly didn’t identify with women’s movement but with emancipation of women as part of broader emancipatory tendencies. (Ibid., 208)

The demands of the women’s movement were clear and most of the time decisively and rigorously expressed; otherwise they would have remained unheard. The image of the quiet and, in public, reserved woman that the bourgeois lifestyle had promoted, changed more and more visibly and created a new type of a woman, namely, a new woman that we can encounter in the works of various female and male authors. Ibsen’s Nora is the forerunner of these new women who support themselves and face the difficulty of realizing their love desires. With her acts, Nora shows that it would be impossible for a woman “to construct an authentic identity and at the same time destroy her generic identity that she’d been taught to feel and that defined the female self in relation to the other, the other’s needs and wishes.” (Maugue 1995: 522–523)

Because of being educated and employed, the new woman was financially independent and that meant a certain degree of freedom in terms of choosing her partner, however, often times that didn’t prove to be just an advantage. Hobsbawm pointed to a problem that feminists faced and formulated it into the following questions: “If emancipation meant emergence from the private and often separate sphere of family, household and personal relations to which women had so long been confined, could they, how could they, retain those parts of their femininity which were not simply roles imposed on them by males in a world designed for males? In other words, how could women compete as women in a public sphere formed by and in terms suited to a differently designed sex?” (Hobsbawm 1987: 217) This esteemed historian concludes that there probably isn’t any permanent answer to this question, yet a lot of women tried to find an answer to it in their private lives, and not too few of them also in their literary works and their articles.

By all means at the end of the 19th century the question of what represents the essence of womanliness became one of the most frequently asked questions as well as one of the questions that offered the most controversial answers. Those answers oscillated between two poles. On the one end, there was a belief that women were defined by their emotions and sensuality and they were not capable of controlling those traits, moreover, that they were not intellectual equals to men, they were incapable of achieving the same results as men, they were passive creatures who couldn’t make sensible decisions. Among those who supported this line of thinking were names such as: August Strindberg, Otto Weininger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Paul Möbius and others. On the other side of the spectrum, there was believing in and defending of female reason. Those women who wanted to act as equals to men in the public sphere, especially in the field of science and arts, often times emphasized the supremacy of the intellect over traditional female attributes. This new look of femininity repelled many men and women. Women disliked it because they didn’t want to subscribe to the way of thinking that assumed that in order to convince the world of their intellectual abilities, women need to take on the attributes of the opposite sex and thus deny their uniqueness. Therefore, those women supported the feminism of difference, as they saw the adapting to the male norm (which was treated a universal) as a negation of womanhood. That was the way women lost their individuality. Thus, they many times stood in opposition to feminist movements, and the women’s rights activists often labelled them as reactionaries. Still, many men and women strongly supported and respected them. Apart from Ellen Key and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Laura Marholm also belongs in this category of controversial authors. However, the impact of her works in Slovenia, especially with Zofka Kveder, as already pointed out, raises the question about how it was possible for a feminist like Kveder, who was progressive in every possible way, to become enthusiastic about Marholm’s work, specifically her work Modern Women. We can find the answer to this question by carefully reading Marholm and understanding how her own life was reflected in her work.

Laura Marholm was born in Riga in 1854. Even though her father, a sea captain Frederik Mohr was of a Danish-Norwegian descent and Latvia at the time was part of the Russian empire, Marholm’s linguistic and literary socialization was done in German. (Sprengel 1994: 711) She grew up in the Latvian capital, was trained to become a teacher and she worked for a local newspaper. In 1880, she published her first play, a tragedy called Johann Reinhold Patkul, and later on another play titled Frau Marianne (Mrs. Marianne, 1882); both of these plays are inspired by K. F. Gutzkow’s realism.

The staging of the two plays in Riga was successful. With the help of Brandes’ essays which Marholm read, she became very much interested in Ibsen and Scandinavian authors and moved to Copenhagen in 1895. She worked as a translator to support herself. In 1889, she married a Swedish writer Ola Hansson (1860–1925), soon she gave birth to her son Ola and started taking care of her husband’s work. Because of his influence, writing about erotic experiences as the most important drive in a life of a woman became central for her work. She attracted attention with a series of articles titled A Woman in Scandinavian Literature; they were published in 1890 in the Freie Bühne magazine. In 1981, the family moved to Friedrichshagen near Berlin. Laura Marholm joined a (entirely male) poetry club and invited August Strindberg to join them. She soon became the intellectual leader of the group (Scott 1980: 87). She surprised the Berlin modernism movement with her dominant act. Stanisław Przybyszewski loved her way of behaving but Gerhart Hauptmann didn’t. (Sprengel 1994: 712) Also Strindberg gradually found the couple’s strong advocating of his works less and less appealing.

She attracted the attention of wider public with her collection of six essays titled Modern Women. After their split with Strindberg, the couple moved to Bavaria, to Schliersee and supported themselves by writing articles and feuilletons. When already living in a new place, she published another book of essays, We Women and Our Authors (Wir Frauen und unsere Dichter, 1895) and once again moved towards literature. This phase of her life is noted for her successful collaboration with publisher Albert Langen. However, this was later on followed by torturous court dealings between the two. She also wrote two psychological novellas Was war es? (What was it? 1895) and Das Unausgesprochene (Unspoken, 1895) and a play titled Karla Bühring (1895). She understood these works as a supplement to Modern Women. (Brantly 1991: 120) The novella Das Unausgesprochene is psychological portrayal of writer Victoria Benedictsson (1850–1888), whom Marholm also describes in her play Karla Bühring. In the novella, however, she turned her into a musician.

The novella titled Wie es war? is a story of a woman who experiences love with a sad outcome, however, that is not the main focus of the story. We realize that the importance lies in the fact that she got to experience love. Australian writer George Egerton (1859–1945) started translating the play Karla Bühring into English, but the staging never happened, so the work didn’t get a significant response from the public. In 1896, Laura Marholm wrote a novel called Frau Lilly als Jungfrau, Gattin und Mutter (Mrs Lili as a Girl, a Spouse and a Mother). It was first published in Swedish and a year later also in German. Ebba Witt-Bratström is of the opinion that Laura Marholm as the author of literary works on the new woman seeks answers to questions about female identity, the relationship between the two sexes, and sexuality. Her texts are filled with a melancholy feeling, unrepresented effects, and a coded female self-loathing. The new woman cannot be fulfilled by a man, nor a child, her desires stay unrepresented. According to Ebba Witt-Brattström, Laura Marholm illustrates her own theory in this work and surpasses it too. (Witt-Brattström 2007: 158)

In 1897 her new book of essays Zur Psychologie der Frau (The Psychology of Woman) came out and a year later the couple converted to Catholicism. In 1899 they moved to Munich, but their son Ola stayed in Schliersee due of his schooling. Marholm’s psychological problems were getting worse because of the court case involving Langen (Brantly 1991: 131–132) and other blows she received. (Brantly 1991: 100, Sprengel 1994: 712) She was suffering from paranoia and her drinking problem got so bad that in 1905 she needed to be hospitalized in a local hospital in Munich. When her condition somewhat improved, she first went to Austria and then to France. She spent the last years of her life in an institution called Majorenhof near Riga. She stayed there till her death in 1928. She started writing again after 1918, but with less success than in her earlier years. She collaborated with important Scandinavian critics and artists of her time: Georg Brandes, George Egerton (Brantly 1991: 105), Arne Garborg, Ellen Key, Anne-Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, Edvard Munch and others. Ellen Key ignited Marholm’s interest in the work of Anne-Charlotte Edgren-Leffler and that is also how Marholm’s friendship with Edgren-Leffler started. In May 1893, Key sent a biography of Sonia Kovalevsky (Sofia Kovalevskaya) (written by Edgren-Leffler) to the couple. In the summer of 1894, also the friendship between Laura Marholm and Ellen Key deepened, as they hosted Key in their Bavarian home. (Ibid.)

Modern Women came out just before Christmas 1894 (it was dated 1895) and it became the first financial success of Albert Langen, the publisher. Soon after its publication, the book got translated into Swedish, English, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Dutch and Italian. For reasons that never got explained, Langen didn’t allow the book to be translated into French, even though the contract included this possibility. On the other hand, the Swedish translation came out without the author’s consent. Marholm and her publisher were good at advertising – they made sure that the review copies made it to the most influential papers. The reception was mixed. Susan Brantly names the phrases that were used to describe the book: “a dangerous book”, “an absurd book”, “and honest and powerful book” and “bad literature” (Brantly 1991: 107). Most of the reviewers were of the opinion that the book was brilliantly written and that the author was a shrewd observer (Ibid.), but they connected this solely with the fact that she emphasized the importance of female independence from men and a fatal signature that a woman gets because of a romantic relationship. It was already Charlotte Broicher, Marholm’s contemporary, who found out that the author gave voice to the oscillations of the soul that were to remain silent until that point, however, she also notes that the majority of women of that time found such revelations of femininity insulting. Broicher posed the question about how such a two-sided view came about. (Ibid.) Susan Brantly writes that the reason for such non-unified reception lies in the author’s rhetoric; the fact is that it is at the same time appealing and seducible as well as contradictory. Another Marholm’s contemporary, Adine Gemberg thought that everything in Marholm’s book revolved around one spot; it roars and resounds with grand words, but it doesn’t move anywhere. (Ibid., 107)

When it was still being debated whether a woman had sex drive or not, the exposure of female sexuality was surely shocking (Brantley 1991: 108; Walkowitz 2000: 370). The feminist movement that completely distanced itself from Laura Marholm’s ideas strongly rejected her book Modern Women. At a congress those women had in Berlin in 1896, they called Marholm an enemy of the feminist movement. (Brantley 1991: 109) One of the most determined German activists fighting for women’s rights, Helene Lange (1848–1930) pointed out that Marholm’s book could be read as a book proposing that motherhood is the only purpose of a woman’s life and thus the book can be abused and misused. (Ibid., 109) That is what was happening with Modern Women. Marholm’s statements were used by men (Nils Kjaer Iaments,57 Karl August Tavastjerna,58 Hermann Bahr,59 Felix Dörmann,60 dr. Max Runge,61 dr. Hans Kurella,62 Dr. Heinrich Kraft63) as proof for their, often times, misogynous ideas. Dr. Max Runge wrote that it is in the interest of women that men fight against women’s emancipation. The author sent the book to Havelock Ellis64 and Arthur Schnitzler and they both loved her work (Brantly 1991: 111). 65

A German women’s rights activist Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919) was certainly one of the most severe critics of Modern Women. She pointed out that not all women could be treated in the same way and put in the same category. She claimed that not every single woman had a desire to marry or be a mother and that every woman should have a chance to develop her own individuality. Despite such criticism, less than a year after the book’s publication Laura Marholm was proclaimed an expert on women’s issues. She wrote articles for various newspapers and magazines and received many letters from women asking for her advice. (Brantly 1991: 119–120) Brantly also notes that the book was provocative because it presented problematic ideas in a convincing manner. In her work Zur Psychologie der Frauen, Marholm suggested – also because of the criticism related to Modern Women – that all women who cannot find happiness in marriage should seek happiness in a convent.

She claimed that a woman cannot create anything anew, cannot make a fresh start, rather, she believed that everything is just a by-product of or a link to something previously created. Even the best women out there cannot transform wrong thoughts into right ones, or a bad seed into a good product. (Marholm 1903: 261–262) She also notes that thinking and working women are barren and their children degenerated. Susan Brantly points out that that was a common opinion of the times and advocated by dr. Max Runge and Ellen Key (Brantly 1991: 144). Marholm’s book Zur Psychologie der Frauen also got a lot of attention, mostly in the form of negative criticism.

Modern Women thematized the then topical and lively discussion on new ideas of feminity. As Brantly states, there was a lot of interest for women at the time; an abnormally strong interest existed in women’s psychology (Lombroso, Freud). It was all cantered around an image of a hysterical woman and some critics saw Laura Marholm as a prophet of such hysteria. (Brantly 1991: 114) In addition, at the end of the 19th century, Germany was a conservative country that defended women’s calling to become mothers and wives.

The book was liked by those women who felt uncomfortable with all the debates on modern women who were successful in their careers. By reading Modern Women they got a confirmation that they were doing fine. (Ibid.) The truth is that Laura Marholm did not denied the importance of a woman’s realization through work and career, she just believed that she could not be entirely fulfilled and happy without finding love and becoming a mother. The contribution of Modern Women to the creation of the “new woman” idea was noticed already by Marholm’s contemporaries, however, they missed its importance for the discourse on female authorship. From today’s perspective, we can’t overlook that which was already pointed out by Susan Brantly: the popularity of Modern Women created a market place for the literary works of people like Amalie Skram in Ellen Key. (Brantly 1991: 106) And moreover, we need to highlight as a unique quality of Marholm’s book the fact that with the help of this book, the author entered the discussion on whether women write a specific kind of literature. She raised the question of what defines a woman quite a few decades before Simone de Beauvoir.

Marholm juxtaposed the accusations that women faced for centuries – namely, that their works show no originality and breakthrough moments in literary history – with specifics of women’s writing which she described as special qualities. Her contemporaries intentionally and non-intentionally ignored this attempt and quoted (many times in a sensationalist manner) only the most provocative statements from Modern Women. Sometimes those statements were taken out of the context as well. Therefore, it seems that a new and detailed reading, analysis and interpretation of Modern Women, the book that has not been discussed much so far, is essential for understanding its innovative value, as well as its entanglement into contradictions and paradoxes that authors who rejected old views and tried to pave their way through a sometimes enormous number of obstacles faced.

The writer supplemented her portrayals of six women with a lengthy introduction in which she stresses that her book is not a study of women’s reason or women’s creative abilities, even though all six women represent a female way of thinking and a woman’s creative sensitivity. Laura Marholm is not interested in that which makes those women famous but tries to show a modern type of a woman, her way of feeling and expressing emotions. This is something that comes up in their lives regardless of all the theories that they tried to develop to explain their way of living, regardless of ideas for which they fought, regardless of all the successes that in fact chained them more than anonymity could. The author notes that that is also the main premise of her book; she claims that all women suffered because of an internal clash that came to light only with and because of the feminist movement, the dichotomy between reason and the dark foundation of women’s nature. She concludes that the lives of most women got ruined because of that clash.

A contemporary woman who wants to break free on her way to independence is trying to escape from her life, Marholm writes. This sort of woman tries to reject taking care of someone, usually this implies being a mother, she tries to untie her knots with partners, but she also attempts to reject her idea that as a woman she is not a complete personality. However, this way, she, not knowingly, also banishes her femininity. The author supports her claims with poetic comparisons saying that modern women get stuck in front of the doors of their inner temple and thus don’t hear the sounds of secret worship celebrations; rather, they tremble in sterile dread and yearn for stimulating pleasures they excluded themselves from. They look for solutions, for a way out of this clashing state of being: some push the doors open and enter and this way, once again, belong to the world of men. Others stay outside and feel miserable. Laura Marholm also states that all of the women she wrote about were individualists and that was the cause of their demise.

However, they were not consistent and persistent enough in this individualistic stance, they were looking for a way out, in fact. Some found that which frees the tied-up individuality, others didn’t. That was because, as the author observes, her most prominent contemporaries are very selective when it comes to men, and on the other hand, contemporary men are rebellious and don’t have faith when it comes to searching for women. Marholm completes her introduction by saying that she identified some secret parts of the female soul with her six women and she is therefore offering this insight for those who didn’t have that opportunity. In the second edition she wrote that she would like her book to initiate the creation of new books which would reveal also other parts of a contemporary woman: her essence in relation to Zeitgeist, her needs, everything that was concealed, her suffering, her mistakes and her aspirations and hopes for the future.

In the introduction, Marholm lucidly formulates the problem that many women who wanted to live the life of a “new woman” faced; namely, the life of an independent person who freely expresses her world views, is independent and feels equal to men, but at the same time doesn’t want to deny her femininity. By saying that Marholm enters the feminist discourse that is based on a paradox, namely she tries to introduce an anti-patriarchical discourse while stemming from femininity. She understands her sex as equal to men and not as a subjugated one. We are dealing with female genealogy in which the maternal role seems to be the dominating one. This is something that Marholm connects with Luce Irigaray. (Witt-Brattström 2007, 149) The author states already in the introduction that she is not interested in the question of what a woman’s life is like if a woman doesn’t fulfil her talents professionally, but rather what it means for a successful woman to be a mother and a woman who loves and is loved. Moreover, she also stresses the importance of women’s fulfilment in sex and the deepening of her sexual relations. The problematic part of her work are surely her individual judgements on women’s artistic expression, as they are written down as claims that are valid for all women. This is also the aspect of her work that M. Scott exposes. (Scott 1980: 94)

Already in the first portrayal, that of the painter Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884), Marholm observes that a woman expresses herself differently from men. The Russian artist doesn’t want to, as was typical for writers, explain to herself who she is. Women want to stay terra incognita also for themselves, as by being just that, they deeds retain their instinctual nature (which would be lost otherwise). Then Marholm notes something that has raised most criticism as well as praise: “A woman has no destiny of her own; she cannot have one, because she cannot exist alone. Neither can she become a destiny, except indirectly, and through the man. The more womanly she is, and the more richly endowed, all the more surely will her destiny be shaped by the man who takes her to be his wife.” (Marholm 1896: 25–26) It seems quite logical that Laura Marholm, who was then in an inspiring relationship with Hansson, emphasized the importance of a woman’s union with a man, a man who enriches a woman with new experiences, especially if the woman is a special bourgeois girl who was raised in a way that didn’t encourage her getting to know real life. In the existing circumstances and relationships, a woman cannot develop her creativity and Laura Marholm sees no alternative to that. She notes, however, that what men create is often foreign to women: “But the woman of our time and many of the best women, too manifest a desire to dispense with man altogether, and she whom Nature has destined to be a vessel out of which substance shall grow, wishes to be a substance in herself out of which nothing can grow, because the substance wherewith she endeavours to fill the void is unorganical, rational, and foreign to her nature.” (Marholm 1896: 146)

Laura Marholm also clearly notes the demarcation line between women who are talented and educated and those who aren’t; she calls the latter “nonentities” (this is what she says about Marie Bashkirtseff’s cousin, describing her as “the typical girl, a pretty, good-natured nonentity”). Marie Bashkirtseff, however, is described as someone who, as a writer, dealt a lot with psychological intuition, insight, understanding, perceiving, vibrations of the soul, all that utilizing a very skilful language too, a language that is very elaborate and unprecedented even for the usually complex Russian temperament.

Marholm tries to supports her claims by pointing to specific characteristics of the (female) biological gender, still, in some parts of the book, she also recognizes the socially constructed gender. She writes: “In all her journeys, she never received a single impression for herself alone; it was always reflected at the same moment in the sun-glasses of her aunt and mother, and never a word did she hear but was also heard by her duennas”. (Marholm 1896: 157) This seems to be, in Marholm’s opinion, a typical life story of a bourgeois girl who is mostly locked up in her small private circle, as her movements in public are limited and controlled. This, consequently, affects her creativity: “Whence should it come? Not from herself, for she has nothing; she has had no experience. She can represent what she has seen, or she can imagine, but that is all.” (Marholm 1896: 168)

Precisely because of her not being able to realize herself in the public sphere, because of this “non-life”, Bashkirtseff lost her youth, her beauty and vital powers. While the man she loved experienced too much, she experience too little and for Laura Marholm that is a good example of a typical life of a young cultured man and a young cultured woman at the end of the 19th century. For Marholm, Bashkirtseff is an example of an artistically talented young woman with a strong wish to achieve happiness in love. This was not in line with her role of a young Russian aristocrat. And that was why she lost her will to live. She could not find a man who could fulfil her personal expectations and at the same time fit the requirements set upon her by her family.

Marholm discovers a different path in the life of Anna Charlotte Edgren-Leffler (1849–1892), also known as Duchess of Cajanello. She begins Edgren-Leffler’s portrayal by reflecting on the position of her contemporaries. She notes that women are gradually gaining respect as a social group, however, that diminishes the value of women as individuals as their sexuality is not longer at the forefront. Marholm believes in women’s nature, something that women carry within them since birth; it is enough that women let this kind of nature live, grow, that they don’t try to stifle it. She observed, though, that stifling is what often happens and states that women and men had never been further apart than at the end of the 19th century: they either both go their separate ways, or they nervously search one another, find each other for a brief moment, but only to lose each other once again. Marholm asks herself whether men of her time are to blame and expresses her view that men of earlier times must have been different, more affable and polite with women. But she also poses the question whether women of her time are to blame for this situation, as they are the ones who influence the male character; the mother’s and the wife’s soul gives the man a lasting imprint. Yet Marhold finds that in most cases women changed themselves: they became more reasonable, hence there is less warmth in them, and so they get cold reactions from men too. She also observes that women became, as she sees them, more demanding, but at the same time not more attractive. Consequently, they are not happy and they don’t make others happy either. Writers like Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler came from those circles. Marholm briefly summarizes the reception of her work in Germany, where she was valued and known (her works were published by Deutsche Rundschau, for example). Marholm writes that both in her life and in her writing Edgren-Leffler defended independence of women; she wanted to convince the world she was a thinking, rational being. Marholm thinks her works are not sentimental, they have no decorative elements, no sweetness within it, no traits that a lot of female writers nurtured. In this portrayal, Marholm also makes a brief excursion into the history of female writing and names a few other names. She first joins together Victoria Benedictsson, Adda Ravnkilde (1862–1883) and George Sand (1804–1876), who, according to Marholm, all tried to be independent, to stand on their own feet. However, George Sand had, as Marholm notes, a lively love life since she was a child of a different time; the other writers ended up – in accordance with their German nature – having ascetic lives. Marholm boldly concludes that that is the reason why Germany doesn’t have any significant women’s literature.

Marholm quickly jumps from the field of literary history into intimate, love life and notes that the women of her times became so rational that they don’t want to love without certain guarantees. As is the case with many parts of her book, this is again where she tried to – using phenomenological views – define the essence of a woman:

A woman’s life begins and ends in man. It is he who makes a woman of her. It is he who creates in her a new kind of self-respect by making her a mother; it is he who gives her the children whom she loves, and to him she owes their affection. The more highly a woman’s mind and body are developed, the less is she able to dispense with man, who is the source of her great happiness or great sorrow, but who, in either case, is the only meaning of her life. For without him she is nothing. (Marholm 1896: 189)

In the following pages, she uses interpretation to analyse the works of the Swedish writer, as she is mostly interested in the imprint of the male-female relations. She finds female characters in Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler’s works problematic because her women don’t want to yield to men, to become housewives instead of actresses.

By searching their luck in love, her female characters break rules, and therefore, her texts end with renouncing of the physical love and conforming to platonic love. Marholm also observes that this is how all the contemporary female literature ends too; the conflict is not solved in a tragic way but in a platonic way. Marholm then discusses the question of what it means for a woman to embark on a writer’s path and, using Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler’s example, she concludes that that sort of life could also denote sacrificing of one’s own personal life. The double standards of the bourgeoisie demand from the writers to hush up that which troubles them and pulls them down. This way, Marholm also point to the difference that represents the foundation of the socially constructed gender: “When a man wishes to be a great writer, he defies conventionalism and compels it to become subservient to him, but for a lonely woman conventionalism is her sole support, not only outwardly, but inwardly also. It forms a part of her womanly modesty, it is the guide of her life, from which naught but love can free her; that is why, the more talented a woman is, the more absolutely love must be her pilot.” (Marholm 1896: 195) By reading the works of the Swedish writer, Marholm asks herself whether her works have a reconcilable ending because of the author’s own desire, or because she wanted her play to be published and staged. As an independent woman without any male protection, Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler could not stand in opposition to the morals of her time. In the work titled Weiblichkeit und Erotik, she introduces a modern girl:

The heroine is no longer the traditional elf, but the modern girl nervous, sensitive, with a sharp intellect, and still sharper tongue; she is very critical, very reserved, full of secret aspirations, and very warm-hearted; her heart is capable of becoming a world to the man she loves, but it needs a man’s love to develop its power of loving. But she refuses him. He is indignant and hurt, he cannot understand it at all, unless she loves some one else. But no, she does not love anyone else. Then what is the reason? She is sure that he does not care enough for her; there is such an indescribable difference between her love for him, or rather the love that she knows herself capable of feeling, and the affection that he has to offer her, that she will not have him on any account, and looks upon his proposal almost in the light of an insult. He goes away, and returns soon afterwards, engaged to a little goose. (Marholm 1896: 201)

She then compares Scandinavian female and male writers and notices that in 80s everything revolved around a man and woman but there was no real female voice among them. The love was gone from the female writers’ works, it got replaced by women’s rights, they started writing programme literature. Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler was among them until, aged forty, she experienced love:

Edgren-Leffler found in her fortieth year that which she had sought for in vain in her twentieth and thirtieth love! The unfruitful became fruitful, the emaciated became beautiful, the woman’s rights woman sang a hymn to the mystery of love, and the last short years of happiness, too soon interrupted by death, were a contradiction to the long insipid period of literary production. (Marholm 1896: 211)

The portrayal of the painter and writer is followed by a portrait of a great actress Eleonora Duse (1858–1924). Marholm sees in her life the embodiment of her ideas on realization of the female element in an artist. Namely, the Italian actress always plays a woman in love as a small woman who looks up to a great man and for Marholm no actress before had been more feminine in her portrayals of women. She writes:

She shows us the everlasting child in woman in the full-grown, experienced woman, who is possessed of an erotic yearning for fullness of life. Woman is not, and cannot be, happy by herself, nor is the sacrifice of a moment enough for her; it is not enough for her to live by the side of the man, a husband’s tenderness is as necessary to her as the air she breathes. His passion, lit by her, is her life and happiness. (Marholm 1896: 99)

The following sentences reveal not only a pompous rhetoric but also already hint at her own crises caused by her powerful fixation on her love towards Hansson and her view that that should be the main driving force of any woman’s life:

She accepts the man with the wholehearted sincerity of an experienced woman, who shrinks from the loneliness of life, and longs to lose herself in the loved one. She has the dreadful sensation that a human being has nothing but minutes, minutes that there is nothing lasting to rely on, that we swim across dark waters from yesterday until tomorrow, and our unfulfilled desires are less terrible than the feverish anxiety with which we anticipate the future in times of prosperity. (Marholm 1896: 100)

Speaking of Eleonora Duse, she puts instinct in the highest spot in the chart of traits, describing the actress’s work as follows: “She has an instinctive, unerring intuition of what the part should be, and she throws herself into it and acts accordingly. (Marholm 1896: 110) /…/ “Her entire acting is tuned upon one note, which is usually nothing more than an accompaniment in the art of acting that note is sincerity. In my opinion she is the greatest woman genius on the stage.” (Marholm 1896: 121) When talking of the art of acting, Marholm speaks of a possibility of a special type of acting, feminine kind of acting. She says that Duse wants to develop that sort of a style. Duse wants to express her soul, her femininity, the individual vibrating of her body and her soul. This can only be achieved if she is completely on her own, totally natural – her body is the instrument of her feminine soul. Even though Marholm reduces the specifics of female acting to instincts, her thoughts still function as a precursor of theories on special women’s art. This type of art reached its peak in theories on women’s writing, or, as Marholm writes: “There can be no doubt that there is a kind of genius peculiar to women, and it is when a woman is a genius that she is most unlike man, and most womanly; it is then that she creates through the instrumentality of her womanly nature and refined senses.” (Marholm 1896: 123)

Laura Marholm develops her thesis on the special women’s writing (which, at the time, wasn’t called like that but still shows correlation with the later concept developed by the French theoreticians, such as Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julie Kristeva) with the help of a book by an Australian writer Mary Chavelite Dunne Bright (1859–1945) who used a pseudonym George Egerton called Keynotes. She stated that the book Keynotes wasn’t written to please men, as this was how Egerton’s precursors, George Sand and George Eliot (1819–1880) wrote. The book is thus not written with a male reason, or from a male perspective – this is a book against men, a book for women. Marholm notes that books primarily targeted at women had existed before, however, those books were literature for old maids. But, according to her, this work doesn’t contain any puritanism; the book is full of knowledge, it is indiscreet in regard to marriage intimacies, it shows no real respect to the husband figure. Marholm, using her typical wording, calls it a book with claws and teeth, a book that cuts and bites for various reasons, but nonetheless still a book written by a lady. She finds that important because she discovers writers who write without inhibitions, but they are, at the same time, actually men in a petticoat, such as Amalie Skram, for example.

George Egerton is different: “She has had an excellent education, and is a lady with refined tastes, with something of that innocence of the grown woman which is almost more touching than a girl’s innocence, because it proves how little of his knowledge of life in general, and his sex in particular, the Teutonic husband confides to his wife.” (Marholm 1896: 63–64) Marholm also writes that George Egerton doesn’t tell stories but strikes key notes that happen to have an unusual, unexpected echo that is reflected also in the letters written to the author and in the act of buying her books. She adds – perhaps George Egerton herself told her that as they were friends – that many women wrote to Egerton, even though she didn’t know them. (Marholm 1895: 114) According to Marholm, the greatest importance of Keynotes lies in the fact that it intensely expresses female emotions and that is what separates it from the entire women’s production. The author’s originality is stressed; namely George Egerton doesn’t follow any particular role model and doesn’t lean on anybody.

Marholm finds traits similar to those in Keynotes also in a French novel titled Les Dilletantes (1894), written by Jean de Néthy (Emmy de Néméthy (1865?–1929?).66 This is a roman à clef. Because of her privileged social status and financial security, Emmy de Néméthy could write without thinking much of the public. Marholm stresses that the author was totally free and could do whatever she wanted to do. For Marholm, Les Dilletantes is a novel that is hard to describe, because “it is womanly to such an extent, and in such a peculiar way, that we lack the words to express it in a language which has not yet learnt to distinguish between the art of man and the art of woman in the sphere of production.” (Marholm 1896: 70)

Marholm compares the work of Emmy de Néméthy and George Egerton with the work of their precursors and concludes that the two authors contributed something completely unique to the sphere of literature, namely, the exposure of a female being. Up until that point, all women’s literature had merely been a copy of male writing, with a slightly more accentuated feminine side. Marholm thinks that the time has come when a woman started to feel her female essence (Weibsein), she started to talk about herself, even though sometimes in riddles. The author once again turns the reflection on female literary activity into a completely different direction – into relations between women and men. She solidifies the representation of a mysterious womanhood, of a woman who is a riddle that men can’t solve. That is because a woman wouldn’t help him.

Speaking of men, she explains that men only know the side of women’s character which they wish to see, or which it may women please to show them: “If they are thorough men, they seek the woman in us, because they need it as the complement to their own nature ; but often they seek our ‘soul’, our ‘mind’, our ‘character’, or whatever else they may happen to look upon as the beautifying veil of our existence.” (Marholm 1896: 71) As the author determines, both writers rejected traditional images of women; they felt quite different than they told them to be. She also states that they didn’t perceive their being different with their reason but rather their instinct. This realization raised them above men and made them feel disappointed with men. Marholm observes such critical viewing of men also with her other contemporaries; they even find men boring, so they can’t find a partner and are forced to kill something within them.

Marholm anayzes Les Dilletantes also on the narrative level. She notices that the writer introduces drawing principles into her descriptions, the language is subtly understood as music, as a sequence of sounds. The one who observes is always the female narrator: “Nowhere in the book is there any attempt made to describe men. The authoress only shows them to us as they are reflected in her soul. In this she not only shows an unusual amount of artistic talent, but also a new method.”(Marholm 1896: 79) The biggest contribution of these authors to literature is their uncovering of the female self, female personality, the kind that doesn’t conform to male examples (neither in content nor in form), but instead searches for a new expression. In the literature of these female writers Marholm discovers a personal feel of a woman, a feel of her feminine personality which is aesthetically shown through rejection of the old forms and in the search of new structures and forms. Marholm can’t avoid using pompous syntagmas and writes that both Egerton and Emmy de Néméthy got their inspiration in the bacchanalian world, hence their books are totally honest. When reflecting on their works, Marholm comes up with an incredibly modern awareness that a female author expresses her subjectivity, her feminine identity in the literature she produces. After this lucid thought, she once again starts generalizing; namely, she states that all female writers in the history of literature had to first train themselves to be writers, or rather, they were trained by men. They all started with a purpose, but mainly without any real content. The content came gradually, from outside. On the other hand, Egerton and Emmy de Néméthy didn’t want to describe, didn’t want to teach, didn’t want to improve. They had no desire to fight stubbornly, they merely expressed themselves in their texts.

For Marholm, this is not only a new phase in women’s literature, but also a new phase in its femininity. She corroborates those claims with the examples of her precursors. She writes that George Eliot philosophized using Mill and Spencer, moreover, George Sand in her novels uses mainly male ideas, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote with reason, tolerance and clarity, like the most diligent of gentlemen. Also Anne Charlotte Edgren Leffler-Cajanello at first only followed the debate that was initiated and led by men. When Marholm is praising George Egerton and Emmy de Néméthy, she once again starts generalizing; she makes generic claims that none of their predecessors wrote about the essence of women and writes that it s not completely wrong when men claim that those type of female writers are merely half women. Such statements surely lack substance and can even be understood as insulting to Marholm’s predecessors and contemporaries, however, we can also understand them in light of the author’s desire to establish and affirm the importance of her contemporaries:

Yet these were the best. Others, who wrote as women, had no connection with literature at all, they merely knitted literary stockings. Mrs Egerton and the author of “Dilettantes” are not intellectual, not in the very least. The possibility of being it has never entered their brain. They had no ambition to imitate men. They are not in the least impressed by the speculations, ideas, theories, and philosophies of men. (Marholm 1896: 81–82)

Marholm points to their relation to and stance towards men. Namely, they see men as their opposites. They didn’t even think of a possibility that a woman could be a man’s equal. Hence neither Egerton nor Emmy de Néméthy are seen as fighters for women’s emancipation. They led their own lives. They were aware that they could not change it. But they were also not open to compromises, in order to achieve something that might represent some middle ground. They represent a new type of a woman: resigned, tired, and more posh than the women of previous generations. This is how Marholm understands the “new woman”, while she also believes there to such a thing as a “new man”, for she states in her typical manner:

They are women such as the new men require; they have risen up on the intellectual horizon as the forerunners of a generation who will be more sensitive, and who will have a keener power of enjoyment. In this way they go through life, without building castles in the air, or making any plans for the future; they live on day by day, and never look beyond. It might be said that they are waiting; but as each new day arrives, and the sand of time falls drop by drop upon their delicate nerves, even this imperceptible burden is more than they can bear the strain of it is too much for them. (Marholm 1896: 82–83)

Marholm’s final realization in regards to “the new woman” thus doesn’t differ that much from the ideas of her contemporaries – the new Eve can wait for a new Adam, but this man is not yet to be born until the next generation.

Also when describing the Swedish writer Amalie Skram (1846–1905), Laura Marholm once again touches upon those characteristics of their literary texts that are connected with their social status. She exposes their social class categorization as one of their key characteristics – in all of the three Scandinavian countries, the writers came from the upper class, they are all educated, mostly at women’s schools and colleges. They are all highly educated; in fact, as Marhom writes:

They cast down their eyes not out of shyness, for the modern woman is too well aware of her own importance to be shy but in order to read. They read about life, as it is and as it should be, and then they set themselves down to write about life as it is and as it should be; but they really know nothing of it beyond the little that they see during their afternoon walks through the best streets in the town, and at the evening parties given by the best bourgeois society. (Marholm 1896: 130)

She only sees one exception among them and that is Amalia Skram: “This one exception can see, and she looks at life with good, large eyes, opened wide like a child’s, and sees with the impartiality that belongs to a healthy nature; she can grasp what she sees and describe it too, with a freshness and expressiveness which betray a lack of ‘cultured reading.’” (Ibid.)

What Marholm holds against the contemporary Scandinavian authors is that they deepened the crack between the two sexes by introducing the character of an ambitious intellectual who makes men feel and act in a stupid manner. They rejected traditional sex roles and searched for new classifications. Marholm speaks of “inter-sexes” (“Zwischengeschlechter”, 136), meaning that a woman slowly became the more materialistic, the more rational inter-sex. Until the appearance of Amalie Skram, Scandinavian female authors (Leffler, Ahlgren, Agrell) were very intellectual. Skram was, as seen by Marholm, the first naturalist, as her characters function in various ways and speak in a specific way. Marholm again uses her typical wording to analyse Skram’s works, stating:

One recognised true naturalism below the hard surface of a problem novel, and one felt that if her talent grew upon the sunny side, the North would gain its first woman naturalist who did not write about life in a critical, moralising, and polemical manner, but in whom life would reveal itself as bad and as stupid, as full of unnecessary anxiety and unconscious cruelty, as easy-going, as much frittered away and led by the senses as it actually is. (Marholm 1896: 133)

Also when writing about Skram, Marholm doesn’t skip her love life. She observes that her love for the Danish critic Erik Skram made her into a writer. She more and more became that which a woman who is on her own can never become. Her husband carefully directed her in the direction which was right for her – naturalism. Her books became more laconic than those of many male writers; they became a picture, pure clarity, there was no sign of a female author in them. Amalie Skram’s talent reached its peak in the novel Lucie (1888), which tells a story of a girl and “it would scandalize any lady” (Marholm 1896: 139) Marholm writes that George Elliot and Marie Ebner-Eschenbach likewise dealt with that topic, but with a touching lack of knowledge of the described situation. Compared to Skram, Leffler and Benedictsson are good, obedient girls with white Sunday aprons. They belong to the upper class and only see segments of life, hence their portrayals of life (which they don’t know) are without any value. (Marholm 1895: 146)

The last essay in Modern Women is dedicated to mathematician Sonia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), whom Marholm sees as a successful scientist and writer, but also someone who in her personal life never found a partner with whom she could feel really fulfilled as a woman. She introduces her by saying that one of the strangest signs of the coming new century is that a woman is intellectually well aware of herself and can say who she is and what she wants, what she yearns for and what she desires, but she always pays for that realization with death. Marholm demonstrates that with the life of Marie Bashkirtseff who fought against moral codes and became a dissatisfied woman in whom many of her contemporaries found their counterpart, especially after the publication of her biography written by Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler. Marholm identifies many parallels between the two Russians; they are geniuses who died of longing for something. Also in her essay on Kovalevskaya, Marholm writes about female writers’ networks and states that Kovalevskaya, while on her honeymoon, visited George Eliot. When talking of the Russian writer’s burning out at her scientific work, Marholm points to the issue of women not being paid enough for their work and not being respected enough for their achievements. Marholm asks us to remember countless daughters of decent bourgeois families who have jobs that don’t pay enough, as competition lowered salaries. She recalls useless handwork that women from upper classes had to do, and she also points to proletarian women who were tortured by misery. Her final thought is that those women exhausted themselves, they forgot what joy is and they eventually became incapable of feeling happy.

Kovalevskaya had a few short love affairs, she was even married but it wasn’t a happy marriage; she didn’t marry for love but because she wanted to go study abroad. Marholm later writes about two types or Russian women: the first type consists of “luxurious, languishing, idle, fascinating women, with passionate black eyes, or playful grey ones, a soft skin, and a delicate mouth, which is admirably adapted for laughing and eating. These women have a most seductive charm.” (Marholm 1896: 22) The second type (also the type of Kovalevskaya) is their opposite. These women are honest and straightforward, plain and sensible in their thinking, brave and energetic, strong in their souls and bodies, they think a lot, they have a flat figure, no curves, they also have yellowish, puffed up faces … They give out a flair of neutrality, they don’t act like women. These are working women, women of ideas. Most of them are nihilists. But this is not just a Russian type; it is just called differently elsewhere: in Sweden, those women are called fighters for women’s rights, in England, they are agitators for voting rights, in America, they are clubbists, in Germany, they are educators. As Marholm point out, this type is universal, the only thing that changes, are the circumstances in individual countries. Kovalevskaya belonged in this category and her attitude towards men proves that. They all liked talking to her, but no one fell in love with her impulsively. No one said to her that they couldn’t live without her. She belonged to “the class of women with brains” (Marholm 1896: 24) and that’s how she was perceived. She was a female genius with a male brain, however, despite receiving the Bodin award, she was – and this is where Marholm’s language sinks to the level of trivial literature – “a woman still; not merely a lady, but an unhappy, injured little woman, running through the woods with a wailing cry for her husband.” (Marholm 1896: 171). At the same time, the author lucidly notes that the Russian was a new version of a woman, a type that no one really understood. And because she was new and didn’t understand herself and she made mistakes for which she wasn’t to blame, time sucked her into its loops. No one held her and made her sing. She became a mother and a wife, but never a lover. Speaking of Kovalevskaya, Marholm uses decadent metaphors,67 as she compares her with tuberose on her window shelf. It has sick roots and will die despite its strong scent.

In Kovalevskaya, Marholm sees a typical woman of her time, the time of women’s emancipation struggles. This was also the time when women achieved the most. Kovalevskaya is a typical example of that. She is an example of a woman who, with a lot of struggles and using the force of her differentiation, achieved great things that speak of a woman of the future times:

If Sonia failed to please, she whose personal charm was so great, whose vivacity was so prepossessing, as all who knew her declared that it was; if she failed where so many lesser women have succeeded, her failure was entirely due to her ignorance of the art of flirtation, an art which is as old as sex, and to which men have been accustomed since the world began. Even the most refined, the most highly developed men, are not geniuses in this matter, where everything has always been most carefully arranged for them. And if they did not fall in love with Sonia, it was due to a kind of purity with which she unconsciously regarded the preliminaries of love, a kind of nobility which existed in her more modern nature, and a lack of the ancient instinct which had been a lost heritage to her. (Marholm 1896: 30–31)

These for Marholm are women who don’t see the meaning of life in becoming a wife but already in their youth search for tasks elsewhere – neither in motherhood nor in marriage. Those were the conditions that produced teachers who came from the bourgeois class. Their main guiding principle is that marriage doesn’t interest them, however, men understand that as these women not being capable of entering a marriage. Consequently, they prefer to stay with the goose type of a woman; those enter the marriage market every year, to fulfil their tasks. Those women who have trouble studying are better suited for marriage. The other type rejects food; they prefer wine and cigarettes. Marholm says that this is where her society sees equality between men and women. Other things that define men and women and can never be the same but can be treated as equal are never discussed, writes Marholm. According to her, the reason for that lies in thinking that it is not appropriate to speak of such causes; her materialistic century doesn’t even look for reasons for things that display some depth. She asks herself: “Can it be true that the best women have an unnatural desire to be half men, and that they would prefer to shirk the duties of motherhood?” (Marholm 1896: 33)

She also points to the unequal position of female and male students, as a woman who studies, in her diligence, doesn’t see the world around her, she is constantly tense and shuts everything out. A man doesn’t know such a condition, since he complements his mental activities with physical and psychological hygiene. Women are not allowed to do that due to morals and sophisticated feminine emotional reactions to the world. Love can calm a woman down, regardless of how temperamental she may be. Kovalevskaya never experienced such calming love. In 1888 Kovalevskaya started a seemingly happy love affair, but it was a long distance kind of love; he lived in Italy and in Paris, and she lived in Stockholm. She travelled to him, to the South, but was still unhappy; she was exhausted from work, suffered from depression. It seemed to her that his love wasn’t complete, so she rejected his marriage proposal. She got a regular job in Stockholm and didn’t want to lose it, her love affair notwithstanding. She felt like she doesn’t receive as much as she was giving. She grew tired of traveling from North to South and eventually grew sick on one of the trips. She didn’t get better in Stockholm and when she started teaching, she became even sicker and died soon after.

Marholm praised Kovalevskaya’s literary texts: the stories Systrarna Rajevskij (The Rayevski Sisters) (1889) and Vera Voronzoff (1892) express such depth that had never been found in women’s literature before, however, Kovalevskaya was never acknowledged, because no one understood her personality.

Laura Marholm completes her essay on Kovalevskaya by saying that she wrote the analysis of her life, however, her biographical note – just like the texts written by Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler and Ellen Key – isn’t a complete presentation of Kovalevskaya’s life path.

During fin de siecle in Slovenian ethnic territory, Marholm was a well-known figure. Modern Women in German original could be found on the shelves of Hedwig Radics lending library and in the library of the General Women’s Society in Slovenia, but the reception in the press was mostly negative and, at large, copied the German and Czech response. Several articles about Marholm’s work were published in the Slovenka magazine. It is interesting to note that, in comparison to later reviews, the first mention of her work is in fact positive. Already in the first volume of Slovenka, Marholm’s work is listed along the side of established foreign writers whose works transcend the works of Slovene female writers. This could be seen as a positive review. We read: “Even this tiny Slovene nation with its fairly developed and rich literary production can produce a few talents when it comes to women. Even if their poetry or prose can’t compare with the works of names like Ada Negri or George Egerton or Neera or G. Sand or Laura Marholm or Kovalevskaya, no one can really reprimand our writers because of it.” 68

Later on, a brief note was published, announcing the translation of Modern Women into Czech.69 In Slovenka’s issue 16, there was a translation of the Czech review from Ženský svět,70 it was an unfavourable review of Modern Women, moreover, the reader doesn’t get a concrete picture of what the book is really about. It says that Marholm doesn’t write about professional successes of women she discusses, which isn’t true. In addition, the reviewer criticizes the fact that she picked women who would surely stay unhappy even if they hadn’t devoted their lives to their professions.

Also the first longer text, summarized from German,71 clearly rejects her work. The rejection is the strongest when the reviewer talks about her book Zur Psychologie der Frau. The article was translated by the journal’s staff writer and poet Marica Strnad (she used the pseudonym Marica II). The translated review has a satirical tone and some parts reveal a pitying attitude towards the author: “Should I get up and throw stones? There is no need. This moth will die even if I don’t throw stones at her. I don’t even want to issue any warning notes about her, as anyone who got caught into the web of her art, is beyond help; but one can advise him/ her: it is best to put a stone around your neck and jump … into a swamp.” 72 The editor of the journal added her comment below the article which reveals that the reception of Marholm in the Slovene cultural space was ambivalent: “This is an answer to that someone who in a private letter addressed to me wrote that when Slovenka came out first, Slovene women should have started writing à la Marholm. As I didn’t reply right away to this ridiculous statement, we are publishing now a longer article by an established German writer (translated by our own Marica II). This is to say that Slovenes really shouldn’t copy every single new nonsense that comes from abroad.”73 She returned to the this article in the issue 24 where she answers the question about the authorship of the article, posed by the reader Ljudmila and adds again her opinion about Marholm:

After reading the book Zur Psychologie der Frau, I conclude that the writer just wanted to be original, since she herself knows (best) that she will not reform the world as she wishes, yet her views are new. The reader can view Marholm after this book only in two ways: she is either as weak as she desrcibes women to be (and she does not really flatter men, apart from the fact that a man should be the absolute master), or she is so perfect and haughty that she sees the world as a miserable place. That article referred only to this book, therefore I do not speak about her other writings. I just speak about this book which was strongly rejected by the German womanhood and which I find full of pompous phrases and incomprehensible thoughts, all of which are mostly exaggatered.74

Slovene writer Josip Stritar also criticised Laura Marholm. He supported writer Pavlina Pajk when younger writers, like Fran Govekar, for example, severely attacked her and accused her of imitating the work of Eugenie Marlitt. In a private letter (5.12.1897), later published in Slovenski list (K najnovejšemu literarnemu boju, 1897, 11.12. No. 73, p. 423–424), Stritar didn’t write the Baltic writer’s name correctly, but his point was clear: “If I had to choose between Marlitt and Marhohm, I’d vote for the the first, and I think I’m not the only one.”75

A different view is revealed in a short review76 of Marholm’s work published in Slovenski narod. The review is part of an article on a notice issued by a German newspaper. The notice said that Catholics in Germany should start collecting money for Marholm and her husband, as they, once they converted into Catholicism, became very poor. Protestant papers and publishers supposedly didn’t want to publish her works anymore. The text ends with the information that Marholm wrote several novels and three sensational books on womanhood (Das Buch der Frauen, Zur Psychologie der Frauen and Wir Frauen und unsere Dichter). All these books are, so the article stated, written in a humorous way and in a brilliant style.

Laura Marhom’s name appears once again in 1900, in a translated article (the original author was a Czech called Arne Novák).77 In this text, the focus is not only on her works (which are, however, also discredited with solid critical argumentation). Novák also talks about the history of feminism. In his opinion, feminism with some women went into extremes, that is “into the development of modern half-wives, non-friends of their husbands, women seeking power, importance, diplomas, recognition.” He goes on: “This is how A. Strindberg portrays them, with his enviable pessimism, those women who can’t differentiate between the state of being eccentric and a healthy, productive emancipation. Those bony, husband-hating, motherhood-hating and love-denying emancipated women whom we fight these days like windmills, grew from Scandinavia, which, of course, can be explained by the small-minded, one-sided, puritan and strict nature of that land.”78

The author rejects those feminists who don’t want to yield to the bourgeois view of a woman, that is, to the role of a woman who is a loving mother and wife; moreover, he praises German bourgeois feminism, even though he admits at the same time that revolutionary texts by German authors haven’t yet come to life in real life; he applies the same thought to the work of socialists, like Klara Zetkin. They, too, only seemingly oppose the bourgeois ideas, but in fact their views are similar. He speaks of Laura Marholm as an author whose name is closely related to the reaction against the feminist movement. He writes that in opposition to the serious, peaceful occurrence of feminists who think about women’s issues at a simple desk in a simply furnished room and talk about their movement in sensibly boring halls of educational societies, Laura Marholm functions as a coquettish, nervous lady who rests in a scented lady’s salon padded with cushions and veiled with heavy dark curtains (Novák 1900: 35). Novák compares her idea of the wild and untamed love with that expressed in the book Vom Weibe by writer Maria Janitschek. He also says that radical feminists forgot what a loving wife is and squeezed love out of women’ s lives. So Laura Marholm forgets about a thinking wife when she talks of a loving wife only (Ibid.). Novák realizes that Marholm in her views doesn’t really see the final goal of women’s transformation, but merely portrays her time; he calls her views decadent, but she still demolishes old forms and creates new: “In her books, we can find some chords hat will sound good in the symphony of the new, 20th century woman.” (Ibid.: 33)79

Later in his text, Novák compares Marholm and Ellen Key and writes that neither one of them puts an equation between men and women, however, Marholm accentuates female sexuality, while Key focuses more on emotions. Novák finishes his articles by saying that a woman who leads an independent and creative life and at the same time stays a loving and loved human being, is the woman of the future.

Four months later, an entire article was dedicated to Laura Marholm in Slovenka. The article was written by a Slovene historian and politician Dragotin Lončar (1876–1954). He discusses the content of Modern Women and agrees with the author when she says women were born to and for love. He points out that Marholm’s fight was intended for that emancipation movement in which a woman is praised as the third sex. Lončar is of the opinion that her views are progressive and important, especially because the ideas of his time don’t allow for women’s development that would be in line with their essence; rather, the ideas that exist force women to change in ways that please men. Lončar accepts the idea of a woman as an empty vessel that can be filled up by a man, but also states that a contemporary man is selfish and demands everything while giving nothing in return. In addition, he believes that men don’t appreciate educated women. He uses the work by Lev Lvovich Tolstoy titled Chopin’s Prelude (1898) as an example of a view that opposes Marholm’s ideas of men. L.L. Tolstoy says that a man can only find his satisfaction in his wife, it is only then that he really lives and creates freely, it is only then that he develops and morally grows in line with with his powers and productivity. It is interesting that the editor Ivanka Anžič decided to publish this article but at the same time, like some years before that, Marica Nadlišek distanced herself from that publication. Anžič made this comment: “We bring this message to introduce our readers to various views on female emancipation, even though we surely don’t agree with Laura Marholm’s ideas. Marholm’s essays were reviewed in detail by Mr. Arne Novák in his article ‘A New Phase of a Modern Woman’, which has been translated into Slovene in the Slovenka magazine, namely, in the II. and III. issue.”80

In 1901, the name Laura Marholm once again appeared in Slovenka, in a programme article by Minka Govekar; she wrote about the General Slovene Women’s Association, in which she advocated female education and warned: “Laura Marholm stated the following: ‘Des Weibes Inhalt ist der Mann’ and that has some truth in it, but still a woman shouldn’t focus all of her knowledge and artistic talents on picking modern, usually tasteless evening gowns, on flirting, on bad instrument-playing and on even more terrible usage of her German or French”.81

Minka Govekar in an interview that she had when she turned sixty mentioned Marholm again. She said that as a young teacher at the turn of the century, she read books by August Bebel, Laura Marholm, George Egerton, Sonia Kovalevskaya, Marie Bashkirtseff, and Adelheid Popp (Peruzzi 1935: 16).

In 1905, the Slovenska gospodinja (Slovenian Houswife) magazine mentions Marholm twice. In an obituary for writer Amalia Skram we read that Laura Marholm, “created an eternal memorial for her in her beautiful book ‘Buch der Frauen’, which was known to many Slovene women” (Amalija 1905: 31). A month later, the magazine reported on Marholm going crazy:

German writer Laura Marholm, who became famous because of her work “Das Buch der Frauen” has recently gone mad. She was taken by the police and against her husband’s will – Swedish writer Ola Hansson – (sic!) into an asylum in Munich. Marholm reveals in her works – with great artistic talent and colour and with full of subtle nuances – the female soul. Slovene women should read her best work “Das Buch der Frauen” and the amazingly beautiful and emotionally enriching book ‘Zur Psychologie der Frau’. Marholm also wrote fiction, but she wasn’t that successful in that area. 82

Moreover, we found two longer texts on Laura Marholm that were published in German in Slovenian ethnic territory, namely in a paper called Marburger Zeitung (1862–1945) that was published by a German minority in Maribor. This paper rarely published book reviews, so the attention that the reviewer Hans Kordon dedicated to Modern Women speaks of the importance of this book in the German speaking world. Kordon writes that it is an exciting book that thrills the reader and makes him think, the author is original and daring in her views. He corroborates that with two quotes that speak of a woman in a conservative way, portraying her as an intellectual and a muse who inspires the world around her, as well as as a person who in vain searches for diversity and playfulness in men. Based on his comments we can conclude that a man can find realization within himself and a woman in the external world. Kordon writes that Marholm presented interesting life paths, but he was most interested in those parts that talk about the relations between men and women.

Laura Marholm is also mentioned in the summary of the lecture Die Frau in der modernen germanischen Dichtung (A Woman in the Modern German Literature) that was held by Eduard Burger, who was a teacher at one of Maribor’s schools (for upper middle class people), at the German Linguistic Society.83 He sees Marholm as an author who tried to answer the question about the future of women. He states that Marholm tried to get this answer through the six portraits of women that she selected, but she was not realistic or concrete enough – she created an image of a woman that was in line with her views. She created this woman of the future in a proper way in the main protagonist of the play Karla Bühring. The protagonist is a successful artist who despite fame and praise she gets from the world around her doesn’t feel happy; she is tormented by the feeling of inner void, emptiness. When she meets a man she loves, she doesn’t know how to show that to him. She succumbs to a charmer, becomes his victim and commits suicide in the end. In this character, Burger sees a realization of an idea about a woman as an imperfect being; she can only be fulfilled if she is with a man. He also point to the reactions within the feminist movement. He concludes that Laura Marholm’s problem lies in the fact that she emphasizes sensuality, since her Karla only seeks sexual satisfaction. He juxtaposes Marholm’s story with Strindberg and says that German male and female writers transformed Strindberg’s and Marholm’s female characters into characters who are not close to the new woman at all, rather, they represent women as victims, as people who found themselves in a crack between the old times and the new age, just like Agatha in From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie, 1895), a work by Gabriele Reuter (1859–1941). The article ends with glorifying thoughts about women’s faithfulness and a sense of duty, two characteristics that are particularly well embodied in a Germanic woman. Even though this article is not original at all, it shows the impact Laura Marholm’s works made at the end of the century. Her writing was known even in provincial places. Burger also shows how the patriarchal ideology impacted judgements about Marholm’s work.

A direct impact of Laura Marholm can be detected in Slovene literature in the works of Zofka Kveder. We find comparable imagery in Modern Women and in The Mystery of a Woman that refers to decadent sacral metaphorics. Marholm writes that for the modern women “the day came when they found themselves standing at the door of the heart’s innermost sanctuary, and realised that they were excluded.” (Marholm 1896: xv) She also states that after being married, Anne-Charlotte Edgren Leffler started singing the “a hymn to the mystery of love”. (Ibid.: 210) Zofka Kveder uses decadent rhetoric in a similar way; in The Mystery of a Woman she writes that “bleeding female souls were burning on sacrificial altars. Billions of them. Souls from all times, from all worlds craved to be sacrificed.”84 In her sketch titled “Let’s Pray to God, to Saints” she is even more decadent: “Every fibre of our body burns in a sacred and pure ecstasy of prayer, of worship, of a desire to be with Him! Go! Read about drunken emotions in the prayer books of out love! Read! We women – the decadent ones! We women – the super-people!”85

While Laura Marholm completes her introduction by saying that she revealed – with the help of the six portraits – some hidden pecularities of a woman’s soul and offers that revelation to those who didn’t have a chance to experience life like that, Kveder begins her book with these words: “Not every part and not for everyone – but for some I tried to describe some parts of a woman’s soul and destiny.” (both emphasized by K. Mihurko Poniž.)86

Intertextuality can also be found in the imagery of a woman presented as an instrument which a man plays on. Marholm says the following about Kovalevskaya: “No man took her in his arms and awoke the whole harmony of her being.” (Marholm 1896: 26) 87 At the end of her book, the Slovene writer writes a dedication to her fiancé Jelovšek: “My soul was like a harp. An out of tune harp. A thousand sounds slept in those strings, but never sailed into the world. […] And then you came. You – you, the artist. You were like the Sun and everything started to bloom. You touched the strings and they sang heavenly hymns and my heart trembled with joy. You, You holy artist of my soul.”88

The resemblance between the two works is partly also revealed in the importance that love plays in women’s lives. Both authors stress the importance of sexual love and ecstasy. A married woman is not happy unless she loves her husband – this is something that Kveder writes about in The Mystery of a Woman, for example in a text titled “Nihče ni pojmil” (“No One Understood”) and “Nekako čudno mi je bilo vselej” (“It Always Felt Somewhat Odd to me”) – sexual love is equally important for a man and a woman and stating that, Kveder brought Marholm’s essayistic writing into the literary field: “Your love poured on me, your eyes thawed my coldness and all the springs of my being burst into life. Hot, yearning emotions spilled over my soul, my blood shouted: You! You! You! It shouted and all the nerves shivered, and my wishes spilled, like fiery lava, all over the pure nakedness of my emotions. My eyes reflected yearning and the whole of me burned with desire.”89

Life was burning in her. She was twenty-four, young, fresh and everything in her wanted something, pushed her somewhere. She loved, loved with all her heart, with passion, power and the awareness of a mature woman. Not with the love of an angel, nor with the dirtiness of cattle, but with a healthy, powerful love of a human being. Sometimes she was afraid of that love. She was raised with prejudice and she needed sanctions for her emotions …90

With her stories of women who never experienced mutual (also sexual) love, Kveder expresses her agreement with Marholm’s thoughts on how a woman can lead a full life only by being united with a man she loves. Slovene writer has a feel for women who end up being alone: she talks of aunt Olga, who cries “in her attic room, grieving her goalless and meaningless life, and bemoans the pretty yellow cat who got lost once again …”91 Kveder also talks of a shop assistant who fell in love with her client, a beautiful young man and when he stopped coming to the store her soul “disappeared, grew pale and wrinkly, like a silk rosy paper when exposed to the Sun too much. And once again she was like a flower without a scent and colour.”92

Female characters in The Mystery of a Woman expect love; in the beginning, they are convinced they would find it: “She searched impatiently and stubbornly for that pure, heavenly happiness her soul always dreamed of. Someone who would love her like the soil loves the Sun, someone who would shiver with love, like a flickering air in hot summer days. And she looked for happiness and love!” (Kveder 2005: 34) Marholm speaks of Marie Bashkirtseff’s love yearning in a similar way.

Zofka Kveder understands the mystery in a corporeal sense; sexual love can make a woman happy, it can fulfil her, but it can also make her unhappy, in case of unwanted pregnancy, for example. Female characters that appear in The Mystery of a Woman are shown in a motherly light, as mothers facing exhaustion, violence, criticism of the external world, especially when extramarital motherhood is in question; they face fear and suffering, they fear dying while giving birth. Kveder thus surpasses Marholm’s views, namely, she displays sensitivity towards social status of women, she doesn’t idealize motherhood and is aware that women who can live out their “femininity” are privileged individuals. Therefore, she mostly portrays women who suffer from being subjugated; she foregrounds social issues concerning exploitation of women, their being marked by biologism (apart from fear of giving birth, there is also fear of miscarriage and rape) as well as their being captured within the bourgeois views on women. According to A. Jensterle Doležal (Jensterle Doležal 2014:114), Czech writer Josef Svatopluk Machar (1864–1942) gave Kveder an example of how to write about the “unjust position of women in the bourgeois society.” Jensterle Doležal is mainly thinking of his poetry collection titled Zde by měly kvést růže (1891–1894) (Roses Should Grow Here).

Slovene writer and critic Etbin Kristan (1867–1953) also compared The Mystery of a Woman to Modern Women in his review, published in a social democrats’ journal Rdeči prapor. He first wrote about feminist movement and then dedicated some space to Kveder’s book and its connections with Marholm’s work:

I don’t want to say that I agree with all parts of the book. The motto that Kveder picked, for example, doesn’t agree with me. Marholm is not an expert on women’s life, she merely fantasied about it and the words that Kveder quotes: ‘Das Weib hat kein eigenes Schicksal – es kann auch nicht Schicksal werden – je mehr es Weib ist, desto mehr wird der Mann sein Schicksal’, those words are, despite the importance attached to them, a big naïve lie. Even if the word ‘fate’ may be justifiable, it is not dependent on sex, but on character, on one’s will, on many different characteristics of a person, of an individual, and sometimes it depends even more on external circumstances. Just like a man, also a woman has her own fate, not only when she is free, but also when she is married, and just like a man (husband) can affect her fate, she, too, often influences his in such strong way that we could easily say: She is his fate. It’s another thing when life circumstances gradually become unfavourable for a woman, more unfavourable than they are for a man. Mrs. Marholm has very old-fashioned views in that regard. Moreover, I don’t understand what this motto has to do with the book? Zofka’s own texts surely seem more interesting and have a greater value, in my opinion.93

Kristan is also of the opinion that the Mystery of a Woman is not a picture of “martyrdom” even though “many pages speak of women’s suffering”. His review is interesting because it wants to stress that Kveder shows women’s suffering only in some texts. However, the truth is that there are only four texts that give women an active role: Molimo k bogu, k svetnikom, (Let us pray to God, to Saints) Nocoj sem bila pri vodi, (Tonight I was by the Water), Nihče je ni razumel (No One Understood Her) and Danes je bila stara štiriindvajset let (She Turned Twenty-four Today).

If we read the texts in The Mystery of a Woman with the intention to find out if Kveder wanted to present women’s fate as intrinsically intertwined with men’s, we find out that for her a woman’s suffering is connected with the fact the society only sees her in the role of a woman and a mother. When a man she is connected with is accepting enough to see her and respect her as a creature that is dedicated to him, a woman’s fate is connected with the fate of her man in a fulfilling way. However, when a man doesn’t respect his woman and when poverty depersonalized both, her physicality and her emotions lead a woman into suffering and complete physical exhaustion and debilitation. The texts in The Mystery of a Woman thus confirm the motto from Laura Marholm’s book and upgrade it (if not even surpass it) when it comes to portraying women’s social determination.

However, The Mystery of a Woman is not the only work that reflects the thoughts of Laura Marholm. When Kveder was reading Modern Women, she also wrote a longer novella titled Študentke (1900) (Female Students), in which she gets even closer to Marholm’s views. This book foregrounds female intellectuals, the love stories of three university students: two Russians – Liza Aleksandrovna and Sasa Timofeyeva and a Bulgarian woman Ana Bogdunova. The Russians are in love with an Italian medical student Farinelli. They are two totally different women, though; we can use Marholm’s words from her text on Kovalevskaya to describe them:

The first type consists of luxurious, languishing, idle, fascinating women, with passionate black eyes, or playful grey ones, a soft skin, and a delicate mouth, which is admirably adapted for laughing and eating. These women have a most seductive charm the most womanly of women. The women of the second type present the greatest contrast that it is possible to imagine. They are honest and straightforward, and essentially what is called “a good fellow,” plain, sensible, brave, energetic, as strong in soul as in body thinking heads, flat figures; they have none of that grace of form which is peculiar to a large number of Russian women. Their faces are generally sallow. There is a curious neutrality about them it takes one some time to realise that they are women. They are generally people with a mission working people, people with ideas. (Marholm 1896: 25–26)

The description of Saša Timofeyevna is in line with the first type: “Saša Timofeyevna, the daughter of an unknown Spanish man, kept speaking in her frivolous manner. […] Every breath, every move of her slim body could be seen through the silk. Her movements were like the movements of a beautiful, provoking cat, and her eyes stared at Farinelli’s eyes and the eyes of his friends half ironically and half admiringly.”94

Saša walks into a passionate relationship with Farinelli. He ends it because he is bothered by her romantic (love-related) past. This is something that bothers Liza as well and she views Saša in a conceited manner, she humiliates her in front of an entire group of people by calling her a public slut. Liza is restrained, she reads feminist texts and expects a lot from her partner. When Farinelli starts flirting with Saša, she cuts all contacts with him, completely devotes herself to her studies and asks herself: “ Ha, ha! Why think of him?! Really, does every woman have to die for the love of a man, as this is the only, the most beautiful goal for a woman?! Prejudice! Old-fashioned beliefs that became – because of unending submissiveness – laws.”95

Farinelli reacts to Liza’s rationality in a cold manner (as Marholm would say). All the way to the end when Liza starts a non-conventional relationship with Farinelli, Liza is shown as a demanding woman who analyses and weighs her love; she is not ready to surrender unless her man feels the same kind of deep love. Marholm describes Kovalevskaya in a similar way; she turned down a marriage proposal because she thought that the man’s love was not absolute. The author of Modern Women points to a special type of a student who in her diligence doesn’t see the world around her, she is tense and shuts everything else out. This was the type Kveder created with Sonja Ivanovna: “Sonja didn’t have any other goals. Medicine! Medicine! Nothing more! The beginning and the end! Medicine! […] For Ivanovna, medicine was a sacred thing that completely occupied her thinking, her wishes, hopes, her whole emotional life.”96

Laura Marholm’s ideal is carried out in Ana Bogdunova, who is much less complicated in love and expects much less than Liza. At the end of the novel, she marries her countryman, a simple and honest man called Petko Dimov, who loves and respects her. Liza’s relationship is different and is described like this:

Look, how much I ask of love, this much! I want so much from a man, but Farinelli can’t give me everything I want, maybe no one in this world can. And then I and all I have, my entire soul, all of it isn’t precious enough to be able to satisfy him. I know it couldn’t. And yet we are both rich. Unclaimed treasures lie in him and in me. I wish I could trade them! But see, his richness is not for my soul and my being stands before him on a different scales, his scales. He is an individual and I am an individual. And the more one is developed, the more difficult his relationship with others is. Everyone creates his/ her own world within him/ her and the more developed one is as a person, the more different one is from the others. See, that is why this love with Farinelli means resignation.97

Not only in Študentke but also in other texts, Kveder lucidly analysed relations between the two sexes and thought about women’s attitude towards love as a central element of her world. In a short story Življenja! (Lives!), she introduced a new type of woman, a woman who is not willing to deny her true self in a relationship.

She was too much of an egoist to find real love. She never gave anything away unless she would get it back. She didn’t know sharing. Her measurement was infinity and she never found this infinity of emotions, so she never expressed her own emotions like that. She didn’t want to lead a life of an ordinary, constrained woman. She knew she couldn’t make any man happy, just like no man could make her happy; similarly, she knew the different sides and the contrasts of her lively, passionate temperament. Sometimes a wild, passionate desire to love burst out of her, but it disappeared equally quickly in the grand horizon of her wishes on the basis of which she wanted to arrange her life, a life rich with diversity and change.98

Still, in Kveder’s opus we can also discover female characters who place love at the top of their priority charts and expect their partners to have strong feelings. An example of this would be the story titled Ljubi me! (Love me!):

Do you love me? Can you hear me! Do you love me, do you love me like I want you too? Limitlessly, fiery, gently, elegantly, passionately, and in an elevated way?

I don’t know what kind of love I want from you, I just know that my soul knows. This soul that I fear may be too big for me.

Do you love me?

I would drink the answer from your lips, I would rip it out of your heart, I would steal it from your soul. I would read it in your eyes, hear it in your voice. I would feel it in the fumes, I would sense it in the energy that surrounds you. And I would know and believe and my soul would be peaceful.99

Strong love feelings that affect the lives of intellectuals are shown in the stories Saša (1900) (Sasha). Ana Jokavenko (1901) (they are both Russian students), in the German short story Sklaven der Kunst (1900) (Slaves of Art),100 and mainly in the novella Telegrafistka (1899) (A Telegraph Operator).101 In her literary texts, Kveder sets foundations for the discourse on women’s relation to love, as that type of discourse didn’t exist before in Slovenian literature. The author thematizes a woman’s love desire which wants to come to life through sexuality and is not ready for sacrifices; rather, it expects equality in a sexual relationship.

By stating that, Kveder relies on contemporary ideas, mostly those of decadence; she also displays great sensitivity towards a woman’s new role in society.102 Like Marholm, Kveder also exposes women’s writing as different, more connected with emotions than reason, and in this way searches for particularities and specificities of women’s literature. In the story Tuje solze (1902) (Someone else’s Tears), she presents us with a character of a writer whose mission is understood only by few and it is probably not a coincidence that a woman points to it. The story could possibly be read as a dialogue with Laura Marholm and her too strict, too narrow judgements on women writers who don’t put themselves into their texts, as she states, thinking of many of her predecessors. Zofka Kveder is more sensitive:

We were talking about a writer.

“I don’t like her,” someone said. She never gives herself, her heart, her soul. Where is she, honestly?! Her eyes are burnt out, there is nothing else within them; she views everything with the eye of a detective, stern and cold; her eyes search and discover. But where is she, where is her soul, where is her heart, where is her laughter, where are her tears? You can’t find them, can’t find them!”

And the others agreed: “Yes, it’s true, we can’t find them. She is a real talent, she fought for it, but she lacks courage or has too much pride to give us more than just her talent; she doesn’t give us her soul and her eyes are cold and silent, they are like convent windows in deserted streets. But this is no longer enough, today, when we spill our heart’s blood around, when with painful joy we tear off the last bandages of our souls!”

“It is not enough, it is not enough!” they kept saying and some were preparing to say nasty things about this writer, this silent and unapproachable writer.

Then my friend spoke up, my friend with dreamy eyes and a profound soul. With a timid and quiet voice she said:

“It is not enough?! It is not enough that she walks after us and picks up our tears, that she collects our sighs and captures our rare smiles?! We are ungrateful, ungrateful, all of us.”

She blushed, lowered her eyes and didn’t say a single word for the whole afternoon.

When I walked home along a dusty road and I got to the hill, tired and sweaty, I turned back and I thought I saw a woman with cold and searching eyes walking at the foot of the hill. She was collecting tears and stored each and every one of them in her heart. And when she got closer, I noticed that tears were dropping of her cold, extinct, searching eyes and falling down on the road. These large, bitter tears are falling from her searching eyes to the road, but she walks on, her feet stepping into her glittering tears and covering them with grey, dirty road dust. She walks on and bends down to the ground and captures every tear someone has dropped and keeps it in her heart.103

With its last word – heart – Tuje solze puts us back to the beginning, to the question of the role of love in the life of a woman and a writer. Kveder, like Marholm, exposes a woman’s heart, shows female emotions as a curiosity, as something that gives a woman, also a writer – if she dares to show women’s wishes – a different value and defines her as someone special. A woman differs from a man, because she is capable of listening to her emotions, to her heart and she can articulate this uniqueness in a literary text; she can position herself in relation to the Other, recognizes the Other as essential for a relationship which is based on a dialogue.

Laura Marholm doesn’t want to see the everyday, prosaic reality her contemporaries are caught into. She egocentrically defines her own relationship as ideal, not reflecting on why she could possibly use her own brief experience as the norm for all other women. Zofka Kveder undoubtedly was inspired by Marholm’s works, but she surpasses them with her feel for social subjugation of women. In her text Pogovor (The Talk) (1907), which consists mostly of a dialogue between Jelka, the painter and her friend Ana, she showed that neither a happy family life, nor an understanding husband with whom she can discuss art, and not even professional successes are a guarantee for happiness. Her Jelka is a demanding woman who expects a lot from life, so she is often disappointed and in a bad mood. At the same time, she is aware that life gives her much. The writer completes the text by saying that “life is not a candy, no one is without flaws, there is no light without a shadow and this is the way things should be, as otherwise, we might suffocate from all the sweet goodness.”104

Zofka Kveder undoubtedly developed certain views on a woman as an intellectual and a literary artist through a dialogue with Laura Marholm, as it was Marholm who thematized questions on female literary authorship that didn’t interest men much at the turn of the century. It is possible that that was the reason why almost everything in Modern Women that sounded progressive (and is still relevant from today’s point of view) was overlooked. Namely, both Marholm’s contemporaries as well as later readers read her work from the perspective of a phallogocentric discourse. Only by viewing her work through its reception by Zofka Kveder, we can identify both progressive ideas as well as contradictions of Modern Women.

Readings from the mid-position of “great” literatures didn’t reveal those characteristics and that only proves the importance and the meaning of new readings, readings from the margins, the kind of readings that enable a different perspective and bring new findings.

Visualization of the WomenWriters Database: Interdisciplinary Collaboration Experiments 2012 – 2015

Aleš Vaupotič, Narvika Bovcon

The Project Framework

In the exploration of visualization methods in the WomenWriters database and consequently, the creating of interactive diagrams and other graphical interfaces that are presented here, the Research Centre for Humanities and the School of Humanities of the University of Nova Gorica collaborated with the University of Ljubljana. The visualization prototypes were realized by the students at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, as part of Introduction to Design and Graphic Design courses, supervised by Narvika Bovcon, PhD, assistants Jure Demšar and Tadej Zupančič. The work spanned from 2012 to 2016. More then three hundred students were involved in the process. In the end, the most interesting visualizations were selected from the results and are presented in this article.

The database WomenWriters collects data on the receptions in the literary system (the data is focussed on the European literary system and the long 19th century). It was first developed within the New approaches to European Women’s Writing project (2007-2010), subsequently, it was expanded as a COST Action Women Writers In History (2009-2013), and finally, a Virtual Research Environment was developed in the framework of the Travelling TexTs 1790-1914: Transnational Reception of Women’s Writing at the Fringes of Europe (CRP HERA, 2013-2016). The database has migrated from one platform (accessible here http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl) to the NEWW Women Writers Virtual Research Environment (http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/womenwriters).

Digital Humanities Methods and Genres, and the Theory of New Media

Digital humanities, the evolving and fast-spreading heterogeneous mix of scholarly practices, is primarily concerned with ways of building, managing and studying the digital collections of cultural data. In fifteen dedicated chapters of the collaborative monograph Digital_Humanities (Burdick et al. 2012), the emerging methods and domain-specific genres are outlined and preliminarily categorized. The new forms of humanities knowledge distinguish: (1) curation of multimedia collections, (2) text mark-up, (3) distant reading and machine reading, (4) multiple perspectives on the same dataset, (5) cultural analytics and data-mining, (6) information visualization and data design, (7) the layering of information on geo-coordinated locations, (8) digital communities, (9) distributed knowledge production and crowdsourcing, (10) serious games, (11) critical software studies, (12) narrativization of databases, (13) remix culture, (14) pervasive infrastructure, and (15) the culture of open access. Such necessarily reductive summarizing of complex activities and dilemmas which are intricately interconnected can be further reduced to a shorter list of more fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks. The theorization of the new media object by Lev Manovich in the 2001 monograph The Language of New Media connects a database–i.e. a digitized cultural archive–and an array of interfaces that facilitate the access to the data. This framework combines abovementioned points from 1 to 5 and point 12. The next key concept for the digital humanities practice is the design of “digital models of cultural artefacts”, i.e. “shapes of argument expressed in information structures and their design”, by which interfaces, databases, tools and platforms are meant. (Burdick et al., 2012: 13, 18) This connects the new media object with points 11 and 13 from the list, critically considering the existence and effects of a digital-humanities artefact, on the one hand, and the production models and different uses of it on the other. As a particular focus of digital humanities scholarship point 6 stands out, namely, information design and data visualization that transform data into a visually comprehensive form by employing visual language. Points 7, 14, and 15 are combined in the phenomenon called mixed reality, whereby the corporeality and materiality of the digital realm are foregrounded. Points 8 and 10 refer to the rules which are constitutive for the so-called humane games and the digital communities: this aspect was first scrutinized in Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext (1997). Finally, point 9 emphasizes the society in all its plurality as a key partner and stakeholder in digital humanities approaches.

Creating an Argument in the Form of a Digital Artefact

The project of visualizing the literary-historical database focused on the methods that derive from the idea of the new media object, i.e. the relationship between a database and its interfaces, and the information visualization and information design techniques. (Manovich 2011) Each visualization in our study was a different interface to the existing database WomenWriters. All the visualizations considered together are multiple interfaces to a single database. This fundamental concept in the field of new media was implemented by Douglas Engelbart for the oNLine system already in 1968; here, the same data could be accessed by “switching views” between map, list etc. (Manovich 2013)

Our approach is an example of generative humanities methodology. (Burdick et al. 2012) It involves building of prototypes in order to collect, repeatedly revise, and evaluate particular solutions for a digital cultural artefact (in our case, the database of women writers). The database in its early stages did not emphasize information visualization methods as its integral part which–together with the collection of reception documents, authors, their works etc.–forms an argument inherent to the information structure. In fact, each individual visualization prototype, as different as it may appear, presents a specific version of this single digital cultural artefact which, according to the theory of new media object, naturally exists as versions. (Manovich, 2001) And from this point of view the humanities critical approach that strives to interpret the data steps in the foreground. The database editors too have created an argument with the interface of the web site for the database where a set of filters governs the display of information in the form of a list of results; the design of the database itself is of course an important part of this argument. In the online Virtual Research Environment in 2016 a network diagram view was added.

The Uses of Visualization

The visualization techniques, enhanced by computer-based information processing, enable a new perspective in the literary studies and other research domains in the humanities. The primary use of visualizations of large data collections is to show answers to research questions that are manifested as visually perceptible regularities in the quantitative aspect of data. Second, the visualizations facilitate a glance into latent regularities in the data, which can provoke reflections about the research subject and offer new research questions. However, visualization methods have also other uses, such as checking for irregularities in the data that would need correcting. Finally, visualizing in order to reach non-specialised audiences for the dissemination of results gives the graphic designer a major role in conceptualising and designing the visualization, while the data expert’s task is limited to preparing the report on the previously obtained results.

Manovich distinguishes between information design which is done by the designer, and information visualization that should be done by an expert in new media and information sciences. (Manovich 2011) The information scientist would work with dynamic databases, search engines, and a multiplicity of perspectives on the data to show the overall structure and the detailed constellations. Information visualization’s task is to discover the structure of a (typically large) data set which was previously invisible and therefore unknown. Information design, on the other hand, deals with giving form to already structured data, in order to present them in a legible, orderly, visually pleasing and fashionable manner. Of course, the process of creating information visualizations uses principles of information design as well: to make the visualization effective and appealing, it iterates between the two approaches.

Organizing a Digital Humanities Project: three Models of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Visualization techniques used in humanities necessarily involve expertise of three disciplines, which translates into a collaboration of three experts: the expert in the domain of data (in the case of WomenWriters this is a literary scholar), the expert in information and computer sciences (who is able to build digital archives, develop search algorithms and visual display of information), and a visual communications expert (a graphic designer who can encode meaning into graphical signs and by means of visual order enhance the readability of presented data).

The visualizations were realized in three different modes of collaboration between the interacting disciplinary fields. First, from 2012 till 2014, the visualizations integrated the input of students of computer and information sciences with the goal set by the course on graphic design, namely, to learn how information is mediated by visual signs. The results, therefore, contained three elements: the possibility of meaning, which existed in the WomenWriters database, the additional meaning added by the visualization (chosen by someone who was a specialist in computational media but a layman in the domain of literary history), and, last, the focus on visual language. The visualizations were a sort of a brainstorming exercise, they functioned as “drafts” or “sketches” and offered several possible starting points for research into the history of women writers. In this first model of collaboration of the disciplines, the literary scholarship’s point of view was included in the database structure and its contents, but it did not actively enter the interdisciplinary collaboration as it could if there was a humanist partaking in the project. The process would in that case become circular and reflexive–the results of the visualizations would be evaluated and the ways in which the visualizations were made would be discussed with a literary scholar and most probably modified and adjusted. In 2015, such model of collaboration was established and tested. The scientific questions about the contents of the database were posed by international literary scholars (who were involved in the creation, managing, and curating of the database), specialists for different segments of the data who were interested to learn about the regularities in the data and connections between authors that could be revealed by means of visualization. Finally, as the third collaboration model, the students of literary studies from the University of Nova Gorica, supervised by Aleš Vaupotič, PhD, were involved as the future users of the database. Their task was to form literary-scholarly questions, i.e. to propose a content-based ground for visualization to the students of computer and information sciences who made the requested visualizations, and to reflect on and evaluate the results, which involved also understanding the visual presentation of information. The interdisciplinary collaboration was an exercise in learning the languages of the three disciplines involved. This is of the highest importance if we want to achieve successful collaborations in digital humanities projects.

Generative Digital Humanities Methodology – the Advantages of Integration of Scholarly Practices into the Pedagogical Process

The method of generative humanities research develops arguments by means of prototypes that undergo a recursive testing and improvement. This approach is typical for design thinking, where concrete solutions are realized as prototypes which are evaluated and perfected (Kräutli, 2016). The advantage of including the prototyping process in the curriculum is, among others, the large number of solutions that can be obtained in a class of a hundred students in a time span of one month, which is the time needed for the assignment. This kind of experimentation would be expensive in terms of money, time and human resources, and therefore unsuitable for industry-based commercial environments. Furthermore, the diversity of solutions obtained in our curriculum-based experiment is much grater than in a small professional team of designers-programmmers, where each person is contributing e.g. twenty different prototypes. The individuality of the students was clearly reflected in their prototypes, and from the several hundred prototypes created in the seven semesters of the ongoing experiment, two dozens of most creative, meaningful, user-friendly and visually pleasing solutions could easily be selected. This kind of assignment is interesting for the students, too, because they get immersed in an interdisciplinary project and real-life research practice.

The diversity of the prototypes to a large extent also stems from our decision to create partial views of the database, based on concrete research questions, and not to visualize all the connections and all the data in a single visualization. The reason for this was the vastness of the database and the limitations of individual technical solutions chosen. Finally, every probing into such a large database has to be partial and structured according to specific criteria that isolate a small amount of data that can be viewed by the human, i.e. they must be functionally displayed for human perception and grasped in their meaningful relations which are reflected in the visible structure of the displayed data. The fragmentary approach allowed for more creative posing of scientific questions by the students, for finding special interests and points of view on the data, and discovering the answer to that question by means of visualization.

The second part of the text presents selected cases of visualizations. On the basis of the experiment, the paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of visualization in humanities and the new insights that it could offer (as observed in our case study).

Visualization Principles

Two key principles of visualization are observed by Lev Manovich in his paper What is Visualization? The first key principle is reduction of the object of observation to only a few observed aspects functioning as variables that are presented with graphic primitives. The second principle is the use of “spatial variables (position, size, shape, and more recently curvature of lines and movement) to represent key differences in the data and reveal most important patterns and relations.” (Manovich 2011: 7) The computer screen has two dimensions, same as the printed page, hence the x and y axis are used each to plot one variable. Of course, when we introduce animation (as the third variable, i.e. time) and interaction with graphical elements, information dimensions are added and a more detailed view of the data is enabled after each user’s interaction. However, there is another possibility of presenting data without reduction, i.e. in their original form, images as images, text as text, sound as sound, the method which Manovich calls “direct visualization.” In this way the original object is preserved and can be referenced immediately and compared to its spatial position on the graph that represents the variables analysed in the object.

Experimental visualizations of WomenWriters database employ the above mentioned techniques, and combine them in a variety of forms. Visualizations were done for the most part with the software Processing, usually using existing visualization programming-libraries, which also helped the students in terms of graphic design, since the elements that the libraries offer are predesigned.

Most visualizations made by students are “image-interfaces” (Manovich 2001): they use the surface of the screen as a control-board, where specific segments of the surface are manipulated. Students used standard information visualization techniques and some hybrid forms. Few visualizations were linear animations or videos; this means that the authors had to master the temporal aspect of the moving image. Others were interactive virtual spaces, referring, on the one hand, to popular genres of computer games and, on the other, to building an archive, which is accessed by means of a spatialized interface. The video-animations and virtual spaces were created using Adobe After Effects and Unity.

The Visualizations

1 The visualization by Sandra Vidmar shows the receptions of Central-European authors in Slovenia. The visualization uses a geographical map to show the region and lines of different thickness to show the number of receptions from each country. The reception types are colour coded (the red colour represents all receptions together) and the display is filtered by selecting a reception type from the list. By clicking on a country on the map, detailed information about the received works and authors from that country is shown in the space to the right side of the screen, using again colours to distinguish the reception types.

Image 1: Receptions of Central-European authors in Slovenia. Visualization: Sandra Vidmar.

2 Domen Lipovšek has created the visualization of all receptions of women writers in Slovenia. The pie charts for each country are positioned on the locations on the screen that correspond to the positions of the countries if the underlying map of Europe were visible. A bigger circle means more receptions in Slovenia of authors from that country. The reception types are colour coded and shown as a percentage of all receptions from a country. When the user clicks on one pie chart, detailed information about the received works of authors from that country is presented in the next screen with reception types placed on the timelines for all received authors (Image 3) or for each of them separately. However, the grey stripe of uniform height that shows the number of receptions for each year as portions of one unit is less intuitive than the regular bar chart on the timeline denoting decades.

Image 2: Proportions of the reception types for European countries in Slovenia. Visualization: Domen Lipovšek.

Image 3: Receptions from a selected country on a timeline. Visualization: Domen Lipovšek.

3 Denis Korinšek and Primož Kerin have visualized the receptions of women writers in Slovenia that were written by other women. The author of the original work is represented with a grey rectangle, while the author of reception is represented with a circle which is colour coded to show the type of reception. The timeline shows two related information simultaneously: the time of publishing of the literary work and the times of its receptions by women authors in Slovenia. With the click on the author of the original work additional information about the received work and its reception in Slovenia is shown. This visualization excludes all receptions by male authors. It is visible from the graph that among women in Slovenia Pavlina Pajk has created many intertextual instances of the works by George Sand, so her work was evidently strongly influenced by George Sand. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer was involved in two theatre productions based on the works by Charlotte Brontë and George Sand.

Image 4: Timeline of Slovenian women-authors of receptions. Visualization: Denis Korinšek and Primož Kerin.

4 Jan Šavli visualized receptions according to gender. The number of receptions written by men and women–a cyan and a magenta bar–are compared in a histogram for each decade. The view can be switched between an overview of the whole century (Image 5) and a closer look on three decades that displays an additional rectangle at the bottom of the screen with the list of the received works. The user moves between centuries from decade to decade by using the mouse wheel. The receptions according to the gender of the receptor can be filtered for separate countries or displayed together for all countries.

Image 5: Receptions in time according to gender. Visualization: Jan Šavli.

5 Jure Cetina and Marko Kladnik have created the visualization of England’s five most received authors. The user chooses first the author and then three countries from the list. The number of receptions of works by the selected author is represented by the size of the circle for each country. From the circle of the country many smaller circles, displaying, with mouse-over function, the names of the authors of the receptions stem out, while the small coloured circles signify the reception type. This visualization has a playful character, the numbers and sizes of the circles are comparable at a single glance, however, it does not show a lot of data.

Image 6: Types of reception for England’s five most received authors. Visualization: Jure Cetina and Marko Kladnik.

6 Vito Tomažin visualized the reception of Austrian authors in other countries. Here, the centre of the diagram represents Austria and each line represents one country. Along the line of the receiving country, several coloured circles are to be found, each colour represents one Austrian woman writer that has been received; the larger the circle, the more receptions of that author in that country. With mouse-over function on the circle, the numbers for each type of reception of the author appear.

Image 7: Receptions of Austrian authors in other countries. Visualization: Vito Tomažin.

7 The next visualization is an example of minimalist design that uses one colour and its different values for the whole screen and thus achieves a clean and ordered look. Tinkara Toš visualized the distribution of literary genres of the works created by women writers from France, England and Germany on separate graphs (Image 8) and combined together on one graph (Image 9). First the user selects the time span (50-years intervals). To the left, women writers who have written in that period appear (under the name of an author there is also information on whether she created any work in the previous or the next 50-years time interval). The authors are connected to the literary genres on the right side of the screen with lines that show the number of works with their thickness. A single colour is attributed to each country, the change in darkness of that colour helps to disentangle the lines and distinguish the genres (Image 8). On the combined graph, only the original colour for each country is used to ensure the difference between the lines (Image 9). At first glance, the relative thickness of the lines shows if the author created a lot of works in a specific genre and in which genres more than in others. The diagram can be read also by following the lines from right to left: we can observe for each genre whether many authors created in that genre or not.

Image 8: Literary genres and women writers in France. Visualization: Tinkara Toš.

Image 9: Comparison of literary genres in France, England and Germany. Visualization: Tinkara Toš.

8 The visualization by Matej Biberovič and Gaber Žinko compares the receptions among three user-selected European countries105 in a chosen timespan; timespan control is at the top of the screen, whereas the countries are selected by clicking on their territories on the left-hand side of the map. The constellations of literary export and import are shown with the lines on the map; the map is duplicated to disentangle the lines (if the lines were shown on the same map where the user selects the countries, there would be more confusion in the display because the lines would be shorter, crisscrossing, and their end-points less prominent), and for the lines of the three countries, the colours that are 120 degrees apart in the colour wheel are used to make them as different as possible. One thick line means receptions only in one country (the thickness does not signify the number of receptions). Whereas many thinner lines from one country (on the left) mean receptions in different countries and also relatively more receptions in the country that is connected with the thicker line.

The user can check the exact number of receptions for each country by moving the cursor over the countries on the right-hand side of the map. By clicking the coloured rectangles at the bottom of the screen a new screen where the names of the received authors are displayed opens up (country is represented by colour see image 11), along with the number and the type of their receptions (displayed using the mouse-over function).

Image 10: Receptions for selected countries on the map. Visualization: Matej Biberovič and Gaber Žinko.

Image 11: Additional information. Visualization: Matej Biberovič and Gaber Žinko.

9 A tag cloud–by Igor Avbelj–shows the influence of German authors in other countries: the saturation of blue colour is used in combination with the size of the letters in the name of each country. With mouse-over a country’s name, detailed information about the receptions in that country appears as white text on the semi-transparent rectangle, positioned just under the name and of the same colour as the name of that country. The whole interface thus uses a single colour, blue, and its de-saturated shades–one colour dimension is enough for communicating the gradation of a variable–, light grey for the background and white for text.

Image 12: Tag cloud of reception of German works and authors in other countries. Visualization: Igor Avbelj.

10 Matej Trček decided to visualize all the information in the database related to translations (Image 13). The screen is divided into three interactive rectangles. The horizontal stretch of the upper rectangle is used for timeline, each bar represents one decade in history (1500–1960). The right vertical rectangle shows the instructions on how to use the interface of the visualization. When the user selects the timespan of one or more decades, the left large rectangle shows a combination of a tag cloud, diagram of relations and scatter plot that presents the translations of women writers among five most active countries in this period. The countries that appear more to the left on this diagram have translated more foreign works then there have been translations of their writers in other countries, whereas the original works of the countries presented to the right were more often translated abroad. Not only do the left and right axes carry meaning, also the up and down directions are used in a way that shows that the countries which appear closer to the centre of the rectangle were less active in creating or receiving translations than the countries appearing on the upper or lower border of the rectangle. This is especially useful when you click on the button “+” with which you add countries to the diagram (to show more than five countries); these new countries are less active then the first five, so they appear in the still empty parts of the rectangle closer to the centre.

We notice that the Netherlands is written in the largest font, which means (since this is also a tag cloud) that this country has most translations (going in and out)–however, this is the anomaly of the database. It does not mean that the Netherlands had most women writers translated abroad and that it translated most of foreign women writers; it simply means that the literary scholars from Holland are entering the data into this database at a much higher rate than all the other countries, which is to be expected, since the database is physically located in the Netherlands. This feature is noticeable in all the visualizations.

The next step in the interaction is activated when the user selects one country from the tag cloud (clicks on the name of the country). The amount of translations of this country is coloured in orange also on the timeline for each decade and the more detailed data about the translations of the women writers from this country are displayed in the right rectangle (they replace the instructions, see Image 14). When the user selects an author from this list, the translations of her works appear on the timeline coloured in yellow. In case the tag cloud becomes too entangled, the user can move the countries around and make a more clear display, however, while the arrows representing the amount of translations going in and out are preserved, the position in the rectangle looses its meaning. This is an example of a complex interface that connects the data on different levels of detail in three simultaneous diagrams.

Image 13: Three connected diagrams: timeline, tag cloud and scatter plot, list. Visualization: Matej Trček.

Image 14: Translations for one country. Visualization: Matej Trček.

11 A tag cloud is used in a very systematic manner in the visualization by Katja Tuma and Žiga Stopinšek. The interface has three sets of filters: first the user selects the authors by the first letter of their surnames. Their names are displayed in the centre of the screen in different-sized letters that represent either the quantity of their receptions, or of their works–the user selects between these options from the first menu on the left-hand side of the screen. From the second menu the user selects the colour coding: the colour can represent the countries of the authors (Image 16), types of their receptions (Image 15) or genres of their works (Image 17). The legend of colour coding appears in the lower part of the screen and is inert. By clicking on a name of an author in the tag cloud, a new screen opens where a blue and a green circle on a timeline show the number of published works and the number of receptions for the selected author for each year (Image 18). The interesting point of this visualization is how the exactly same display can be used for different categories of data that are selected from the three related and well ordered menus–the basis for this design of the interface and information visualization is a good understanding of information structure, i.e. of the relations between the categories of data.

Image 15: Authors ordered by the number of works written, colours represent reception types. Visualization: Katja Tuma and Žiga Stopinšek.

Image 16: Authors ordered by number of receptions, colours represent countries of the authors. Visualization: Katja Tuma and Žiga Stopinšek.

Image 17: Colours represent literary genres. Visualization: Katja Tuma and Žiga Stopinšek.

Image 18: Numbers of works and receptions for a selected author in time. Visualization: Katja Tuma and Žiga Stopinšek.

12 The amount of published literary works in different genres in England and France is compared on the histogram. Blaž Jeršan used both sides of the y axis to show and compare the values for the two countries, England above the x axis and France below the x axis. This approach in design allows to see simultaneously and clearly the development of genres though time for each country by creating a blue (England) and green (France) area. Three genres (novel, poetry and drama) can be selected and shown separately or together on the diagram. Each genre is represented with a different value of blue or green colour. With mouse-over a year, more detailed information about the publications in that year is displayed in a rectangle.

Image 19: Timeline comparing the amount of published literary works in England and France. Visualization: Blaž Jeršan.

13 In the visualization created by Jan Češnjevar and Miha Kavčič the receptions through time are shown not on a timeline but on concentric circles that represent time periods. Two semi-circles show two types of information: the upper part shows the receptions of the selected author, and when they were written. Authors are selected from the menu on the right-hand-side of the screen. The lower part of the circle shows the works that the author received. The density of dots in the upper semi-circle compared to the density of the dots in the lower semi-circle compares at a single glance the number of receptions of the author with those by the author. The user can zoom in and out in the timeline by turning the wheel on the mouse. The dots that represent the receptions are colour coded according to the type of reception. By clicking on a dot, detailed information about the reception is displayed. The interface has a white background, the menu for selecting the authors is differentiated from the display by the black background. The colours are numerous, however, they are used only on the tiny dots and the letters that write the types of receptions (that also function as filters).

Image 20: Two semi-circles are used to show receptions in time of the selected author and by that author. Jan Češnjevar and Miha Kavčič.

Image 21: Zoom-in and detailed view. Visualization: Jan Češnjevar and Miha Kavčič.

14 Jan Markočič and Kristina Batistič showed the popularity of literary genres in European countries through time. Genres are colour coded (the legend functions also as a filter) and represented with lines of different length, depending on the number of works written in that genre in a country at a certain time. The lines are animated and can be paused on the timeline. With mouse-over a country, the authors and titles of literary works are displayed along with the exact numbers of works in different genres.

Image 22: Literary genres represented with ray-like lines. Visualization: Jan Markočič and Kristina Batistič.

15 Aleksandar Kojić and Dejan Grbec have shown on two diagrams the distribution of genres in different countries in selected time interval and the longevity of authors. In the bar chart the colours represent the literary genres, while on the second timeline, the colours represent the countries of the authors. A distant view of the longevity distribution shows a few anomalies which are actual mistakes in the entered data (eg. 200 years of age for an author). The visualization thus enables us to find the mistakes and correct them.

Image 23: Distribution of literary genres. Visualization: Aleksandar Kojić, Dejan Grbec.

Image 24: Mistakes in the data visible in the longevity of the authors. Visualization: Aleksandar Kojić, Dejan Grbec.

16 A simple pie chart is used in the visualization of the proportion of published works by foreign and domestic authors for each country created by Nina Habjan and Veronika Horvat. On a single white surface of the screen there are eleven circles that represent eleven countries, each circle line is rendered in different colour. Inside the circle on the white background the names of authors of published works are written in different sizes, denoting the number of works, and in colours that correspond to the colour of the country the author comes from. The white background and the vivid colours, in combination with condensed sans-serif letters and circular shapes, infer the sensation of lightness and playfulness. With mouse-over, the circle fills with the colour of its stroke in two parts, the one less saturated shows the proportion of foreign authors.

Image 25: Synthesis of several meanings in each graphical sign: position of the name of the author shows in which country her works were published, while the colour of the name represents the country that she comes from. Visualization: Nina Habjan and Veronika Horvat.

17 The visualization by Tomaž Čufer and Luka Debevec shows the network diagram of the upper 5% of most connected authors. Each author is represented by a coloured circle, the size of which depends on the number of connections. With mouse-over a circle, the name of the author and the number of her connections are displayed in the upper left-hand-side section of the screen. The largest part of the interface is reserved for the display of the network diagram on a neutral white background, while the interface controls are placed at the edges of the screen. The button H (and the key “H” on the keyboard) switches the view to the histogram of the same data (Image 27) which shows the frequency of each number of connections per author. The so-called “long-tail”, typical of the networks in nature, is clearly visible: a very small number of authors have a lot of connections while the large majority of the authors have just a few connections. (Anderson 2004; Barabási and Albert 1999).

Image 26: Network diagram of authors. Visualization: Tomaž Čufer and Luka Debevec.

Image 27: Long-tail distribution of receptions. Visualization: Tomaž Čufer and Luka Debevec.

18 The visualization by Miha Lunar and Darko Božjak shows different types of reception (mention, article in the press, theatre production, translation, library catalogue, obituary, intertextuality …) between European countries in time. The animation (that can be paused by pressing the space bar, slowed down or sped up by using the keys “–” and “+”) draws the lines, representing the types of reception with colour coding, between the points that represent the capitals and are arranged on the neutral white background in the locations as they would appear on an (invisible) map of Europe, for the years in which the receptions took place. Synchronous with the animated lines of receptions, the names of the cities with numbers of their receptions are displayed in a table in the upper right-hand-side section of the screen. However, there are no country-borders in this visualization–reflecting on the fact that borders change in time, while cities remain fixed in space.

Image 28: Animation shows receptions between European countries in time. Visualization: Miha Lunar and Darko Božjak.

19 The visualization by Rok Kralj shows the receptions between countries on the map of Europe in a different way. The lines are straight and uniformly black so that after some time, i.e. after a few centuries of receptions are drawn by the animated visualization, the overall appearance of the visualization becomes an entangled nest which has more of an expressive character and less of a diagrammatic value. The colours are used to differentiate the elements of the visualization interface: light green for the countries, white for the background, black for all data and red for the selected reception line. The animation can be paused and with mouse-over detailed data about the selected reception line are displayed in a rectangle.

Image 29: Animated culmination of receptions in time. Visualization: Rok Kralj.

20 The previous two cases were animations made on the Processing (and Java) platform, in the case of Lunar and Božjak the result was a linear file containing animation (Image 28). Some visualizations were made as video tapes in Adobe After Effects. Information graphics for the videos were designed in vector graphics software and imported into After Effects where their parts were animated as motion graphics layers. One example is the information portrait of Jane Austen–all information about the author from this data base is displayed–created by Urša Medvešek.

Image 30: Portrait of Jane Austen: when she published her works. Visualization: Urša Medvešek.

Image 31: Authors read by Jane Austen. Visualization: Urša Medvešek.

21 Another example is the animation created by Boris Savič and Martin Širok that combines the visual language of icons (image of a girl) with statistical information in the form of catchy phrases and with animated bars on the map. The colours are neutral, the background introduces the chaotic atmosphere with a texture of clouds to fill the image with a visually engaging layer that contrasts the vector graphic character of all other elements.

Image 32: A frame from the motion graphics video, a vector graphic icon functions as logo. Visualization: Boris Savič and Martin Širok.

Image 33: A frame from the motion graphics video, statistical representation of data on a map. Boris Savič and Martin Širok.

The Second Collaboration Model

In 2015, the second stage of the project tested another interdisciplinary collaboration model. The researchers and university professors–those who have designed and worked on the Women Writers database–have participated already in the phase of determining the research question which would function as the bases for information visualization and interface design. At the first stage of our project–from which the twenty visualizations presented above were selected as best examples–the research question was formulated provisionally by the students of computer and information science and therefore in many cases this step was not done with all the necessary care needed by humanities research (in some cases the research question could be fundamentally problematic since it compared non-comparable data). The inclusion of literary scholars in the project workflow shifted the focus from learning visual language and interaction models towards proper humanities’ research, since the scientific question was now much more demanding and complex. However, the students’ task was still to find a way of visualizing the research question in the best possible way. The students focussed primarily on visual rhetoric and much less on the content design. Two new, carefully prepared data sets on reception links in the Dutch literary system were provided by Suzan van Dijk, PhD, from Huygens ING, The Hague. Moreover, a then PhD student at the University of Glasgow Judith Rideout prepared a data set on the strength of connections between Spanish speaking authors who have published in different literary journals–the authors either knew of other authors, the awareness could be reciprocal, or, and this is the highest strength of connection, the authors could jointly work on projects. For the latter dataset, two very different interactive visualizations were realized making it easier to see the strength of ties between Spanish authors.

22 The three types of line (dashed, regular, dark) represent the strength of connections between Spanish authors—they are presented as dots in the diagram–working for a particular journal (selected from the menu on top). The colours represent countries. A click on individual node on the graph displays more information about the chosen author. The network is interactive, it can be moved, its nodes and edges can be disentangled, the graph simulates a mesh made from elastic bands. The interaction facilitates gradual discovery of connections in a network with too many connections to be visually readable at once.

Image 34: Network diagram of authors writing for one magazine. Visualization: Mojca Komavec and Viki Petrovič.

Image 35: Network diagram of authors in all magazines. Visualization: Mojca Komavec and Viki Petrovič.

23 In the visualisation solution by Marija Djurdjević the strength of connections between the authors is colour-coded in three steps. The authors are placed on a circle. The colour of the segmented circle represents the selected journal (more than one can be selected), which is explained by the legend on the left.

Image 36: Three levels of connections of one selected author in all magazines. Visualization: Marija Djurdjević.

Image 37: The selected author has only connections of level 2 and 3 with authors in one magazine. Visualization: Marija Djurdjević.

24 The serious games can be used as a particular case of interactive visualization. A network of receptions between Dutch authors, i.e. the quotes connecting one author to another that were prepared by Suzan van Dijk, PhD, was designed as an interactive virtual reality. With the Unity game development platform, the project facilitated the user to walk (in a first-person view) around a stylized Dutch landscape between buildings representing the nodes in a literary reception network, i.e. the writers of receptions and authors. While walking from one house to another, the user sees and reads a quotation by the author represented by the first house about the author represented by the building that is being visited next. The key aspect in this example is the innovative interface that allows for a spatial reading–a collection of quotes and their connections is dynamically and in a succession placed in a 3-D computer-generated space (Grosar, Demšar, and Bovcon, 2015). The instructions at the bottom of the screen guide the user towards the house or windmill of the next author who is referred to in the quote displayed at the top of the screen.

Image 38: Interactive virtual space with the network of quotations of Dutch women writers. Visualization: Jernej Grosar.

Image 39: The user reads the quotation while walking from one building to the other. Visualization: Jernej Grosar.

Conclusion

As the project was realized, the relationships of the three experts and their practices (designer, computer engineer and literary scholar) became clearer. The role of a designer would still be to provide adequate visual communication, however, in the past digital humanities practices too much emphasis was put on the static visual display (as in print media), whereas a video or new media artist would be more focused and media sensitive in the creation of animation, interaction, and image-maps for the computer screen. The interface guides the user at contributing to and ordering the archive, searching for specific elements of the archive and visualizing the relations between selected elements. All of this is achieved through the use of principles of visual communications design that connect traditional graphic design strategies of ordering the visual signs on a two-dimensional image-plane with the montage of moving images (its time aspect), and the language of new media that introduces interactivity of the digital image on the real-time screen and the characteristics of the new media object-numerical representation of all content, modularity, automation, variability and cultural transcoding. (Manovich 2001)

On the basis of the experiment, several insights into the problems related to visualizing such a database as WomenWriters were obtained. The visualizations presented above attempted to formulate and answer one specific question about a selected segment of data from the WomenWriters database. They visualized possible research questions that address a narrow selection of data, instead of creating a universal interface to filter the whole database by categories, such as authors, timespan, receptions, literary genres … In this way the visualizations are more narrative–which makes them story-like and easy to grasp–and complete since they visualize a concrete answer in the optimal way. They are adequately designed and meaningfully constructed to connect the elements encoded in visual signs. Instead of just filtering the database, it would also be possible to use a search interface, however, none of the students decided to code it, probably due to the choice of software with which the visualizations were created. Most visualizations were the so-called “image-interfaces”: they used the surface of the computer screen as a control board, where specific segments of the surface were manipulated with the cursor. Students used standard information visualization techniques: scatter plots, line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, maps, tag clouds, diagrams and their hybrids.

One specific problem–that should be solved in collaboration with the domain expert–is the weighting of data. E.g. in order to visualize networks of relations between the participants in a literary system it would be necessary to weigh the data categories. Data categories such as types of reception have no evident value and here the literary scholar should advise on the visualization of the impact each type of reception has: is a “mention” a less-strong connection in a literary system than a “theatre production” or what is the quantitative relation between “intertextuality” and “translation.” On the other hand, to visualize the differences between 1 and 1000 units, it is necessary to use an algorithm that makes the large differences fit into one legible presentation.

In the realised projects, the wrong uses of the pie chart in which the circle should imply wholeness, completeness and not just a random selection were frequent. A common mistake from the usability perspective was the inactive legend, which explained e.g. the colour coding of elements as in print media, but it did not function as a filter. Similarly, the use of maps has its limitations, since it is redundant to illustrate the shape of the country when we can denote the country by its name. The maps should be used in the cases when they show also geographical aspects of the relations between the authors. The use of maps in visualization has to omit all the unnecessary information from the map (rivers, altitude, relief, roads, boarders …) if this information is not meaningful in the comparison of the selected data. A historicization of the map of countries would be necessary because of the changes throughout history. A comparison of maps and timelines that represent different values (periodization of literary genres, political history, cultural achievements, migrations, economic centres, density of population, transport …) would be interesting to employ also in the research of the women writers history. In this regard, it would be even more useful to present the cities where the works of women writers were published and received (the information on places of publication is often available in the database, and it could be used in the future), since the cities stay at the same spot on the map during larger segments of history, whereas the borders of countries change, some countries are also non-existent until some point in history, others do not exist any more. Not only political constructs of spatial arrangements have to be carefully considered, but also the timeline should not be segmented arbitrarily. A clever solution would be to make a multi-layered timeline segmentation that would show literary periodization and, separately, periods of political history, not just a sequence of arbitrary year intervals. For literary periodization a collaboration with literary historians would be essential.

Edward Tufte (1983) points to the problems of deceptive graphical presentation of information, the reason for which is sometimes poor design, done by non-designers, and sometimes intentional deception. The role of beauty in information visualization is a complex phenomenon. Suffice to say, graphical design of the visualization should follow the rules of visual language and graphical signs should not be redundantly used, on the contrary, each sign should encode more than one dimension of information by using different aspects of its visual appearance. However, some visualizations go beyond that point to make charming, emotional and witty statements with their visual form and in relation to the data presented.

The visualizations address different research foci and present arguments which are otherwise difficult to grasp in a non-visual form. In each of them, visual language (colour, form, space, scale, rhythm) is deliberately used to encode meaning in graphical signs. Interactivity of computer-based visualizations is another powerful tool for exploring data on different levels of scale, toggling the view of the whole collection with the detailed views, which reveal more attributes. Tested with visualization, the irregularities of the data can be found and reconsidered; there might be mistakes in the data entered. Another example that becomes evident on the level of the whole collection–when we try to make quantitative comparisons–is the distortion in the data due to unequal contribution of different countries in filling the database. And also due to the fact that the database is itself a work in progress.

The attempt at distant reading of this database is not primarily faced with the dilemma of reducing a complex humanities’ data set to one or only a few properties, which facilitates the comparison of individual property-values in the first place. (Drucker 2011) More important, distinction in this case is the one between the structurally open and unfinished database–such as Women Writers, which is being visualized as the data set is still being collected in real-time by connecting to the web-service, and a closed, consummated whole: an instance of the latter would be a finished dramatic text, with a fixed number of characters etc.. The visualizations may draw the relationships between them, their simultaneous or successive presence on the scene/stage, or the amount of spoken text of individual characters. (Grandjean, 2015) The vast geographical and temporal distances, and the uneven data entry for different spatial and temporal segments in the Women Writers database is the reason why the networks’ visualization requires limited views (e.g. focus on one country or territory) in order to obtain comparable information configurations that can be grasped through visual perception. Maybe in time as more data are entered in the WomenWriters database, also the quantitative comparisons will become more meaningful. For now, with this partially and unevenly filled database, isolated research questions that take into account a minor segment of data are more plausible.

Some research questions are more meaningful then others, which is evident also from the visualizations. Visualizations of the development of literary genres in time (compared across different countries) were successful. Diagrams that showed the dates of the publishing of literary works in relation to their receptions showed in which countries and for which works significant delays occured. The dates of the publishing of works for a single author showed when, during her lifetime or after death, the works were first published. The network diagram of the connections between authors showed that very few authors were widely received; by far, the most popular author was George Sand.

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Contributors

Tanja Badalič holds a PhD in Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures from the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She is teaching assistant of World Literature at the School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica. Her main research interests are early Slovenian women writers, Pavlina Pajk in particular, the reception of European women writers in the 19th-century Slovenian Lands, women’s literature, literary reception, digital humanities, and ecocriticism. During her postgraduate studies she was involved in the European COST Action IS0901 Women Writers in History (2009–2013) and in the project HERA Travelling TexTs 1790–1914 (2013–1016).

tanja.badalic@gmail.com

Katja Mihurko Poniž holds a PhD in Women Studies and Feminist Theory from the University of Ljubljana. She is Associate Professor of Slovenian Literature at the School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica. Her research interests include early Slovenian women authors, especially Zofka Kveder, the history of women’s movement in Habsburg monarchy, digital humanities, and the relations between Slovenian, German, and Slavic literatures. She is the author of four books. For her last scholarly monograph Zapisano z njenim peresom: prelomi zgodnjih slovenskih književnic s paradigmo nacionalne literature, 2014 (Written with her Pen: a Deviation of Early Slovene Female Writers from the Paradigm of National Literature) she has been awarded the state scientific Zois award. She is the editor of the critical edition of Collected Works of Zofka Kveder (three volumes of the collection have been published so far). During the Spring semester (2016), she was also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Vienna, where she taught a course Gender in Slavonic Cultures.

katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si

Aleš Vaupotič, PhD, is a literary comparatist, a videoartist, an Assistant Professor of Literature, the dean of the School of Humanities, and the head of the Research centre for humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. In his work he combines artistic and scholarly approaches. His areas of research include theory of discourse, theory of new media and theory of literary realism.ales.vaupotic@ung.si

Narvika Bovcon, PhD, is a researcher at the Computer Vision Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, and an Associate Professor for courses in graphic and new media design. She has authored numerous scientific papers and new media art projects that were exhibited in Slovenia and abroad. She also works as a curator and producer.narvika.bovcon@fri-uni.lj.si

1 The CRP is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info), co-funded byAHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007. The Slovenian research group was composed of Katja Mihurko Poniž, PhD (principle investigator), Aleš Vaupotič, PhD (senior researcher) and Tanja Badalič, PhD (post-doc researcher).The project partners were the following researchers: Henriette Partzsch, PhD (Project Leader), University of Glasgow and Principle Investigators: Professor Marie Nedregotten Sørbø (Volda University College), Professor Päivi Lappalainen (University of Turku), Suzan Van Dijk, PhD (The Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands) and Katja Mihurko Poniž, PhD (University of Nova Gorica).

2 http://isllv.zrc-sazu.si/en/zbirka/card-catalogue-of-foreign-authors-in-slovenian-periodicals#v.

3 Periodicals in German were published in Slovenian lands since the 18th century. (Žigon 2001: 9)

4 Categories in periodicals were classified on records in the catalogues at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. For instance: mention, quotation, article, report, review, note…

5 Debeljak, Anton. “Pregled glavnih zastopnic francoskega slovstva.” Slovenska žena (1912): 52 – 55, 81 – 85.

6 Anton Debeljak (1887–1952) studied Romance languages in Paris. In his article he refers to the book by Philibert Audebrand Romanciers et viveurs du XIXe siècle (1904).

7 Prunk, Ljudmila. “Italijanske pisateljice in pesnice.” Slovenska žena 4/5 (1912): 122–126.

8 Ljudmila Prunk’s overview is a summary of an Italian article published not long before hers, but she didn’t write the title.

9 X. H. “Jugoslavjanske pisateljice.” Zora Zora 3 (1874), 14, 225–227; 16, 269–273 17, 292–295, 18, 313–315, 19, 331–334.The article refers to three sources: Vienac 8, 1873; S. Llubid: Ogledalo književne poviesti jugoslavjanske, 1869, and Šafarik & Jireček: Geschichte der Südslawischen Literatur, 1865.

10 Miklavec, Peter. “Književno delovanje Malorusov.” Slovanski svet 1 (1888), 10, 160-161.

11 Volynskiy, Akil. “Ruska poezija.” Ljubljanski zvon 21 (1901), 9, 619–626.

12 Volynskiy, Akil. “Ruski novelisti.” Ljubljanski zvon (1902), 2, 88–93; 3, 156–158.

13 Novák, Arne. “Češka literatura v novem stoletju.” Veda (1914): 140–141, 298–300.

14 Sometimes referred to as just “Književnost”.

15 Leopold Paternolli, a bookseller and editor, published three catalogues of his library in Ljubljana: in 1833, 1834 and 1854.

16 Janez Giontini (1818–1879), bookseller and editor, founded a lending library in 1846 in Ljubljana. He published seven library catalogues: in 1846, 1851, 1853, 1856, 1860, 1861 and 1865.

17 Hedwig von Radics-Kaltenbrunner (1845–1919), the Austrian woman writer, publicist, critic, editor and social activist, founded in 1886 the first private library in Ljubljana. Radics-Kaltenbrunner spent her youth in Vienna and the rest of her life in Ljubljana.

18 The catalogue was printed in Ljubljana in 1905.

19 The catalogue was printed in Ljubljana in 1916.

20 Count Francesco Grisoni (1771–1841), a wealthy bibliophile from Koper, brought from his many trips to Italy and France a lot of book that he left in his will to the Koper orphanage Pio Instituto Grisoni. His collection, kept by the Srečko Vilhar Public Library in Koper, contains about 5,000 items. Grisoni’s collection was brought to my attention by the researcher Mojca Šauperl.

21 Slovenian writer and politician Janko Kersnik (1852–1897) had an extensive library that was also used by his family.

22 Founded in 1901, the General Women’s Society was the first Slovenian feminist association. It was open to all Slovenian women regardless of their social status or profession. Its headquarters were in Ljubljana but it operated for the benefit of all Slovenian women. Its principal goal was women’s education. The society organized lectures, courses, exhibitions, charity events, voting rallies and other events involving women’s rights; it assisted unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, divorced women and widows, mothers and single women. It was abolished in 1945. (Budna Kodrič 2003: 74)

23 We didn’t find any information on the writer.

24 Established in 1908 as the Political and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District, it changed its name to the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District in 1913. From the very beginning, its main goal was “educational work among members and spreading education to the general population”. (Gospodarsko in izobraževalno društvo za dvorski okraj 1933: 3) One of its most important elements was the so-called Court Library. Other than political activity, the society also organised lectures and social evenings. (Ibid., 6, 7)

25 The writer probably lived in the 19th century. The exact dates of her birth and death were not found.

26 Koper (Capodistria) is a town on the Slovenian coast close to the border with Italy. It has two official languages: Slovene and Italian.

27 Katarina Bogataj-Gradišnik writes: “The first German translation of Jane Eyre was published in Berlin in 1848 and since the novel was extremely popular in German-speaking countries and hence also available to the Slovenian reader […] Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s dramatisation entitled Die Waise von Lowood (The Orphan from Lowood, 1855) got the better of the original in the German language region. This adaptation was known in Slovenian lands at least in 1865 when it was staged in Maribor. Translated by Davorin Hostnik under the title Lowoodska sirota, the Provincial Theatre in Ljubljana put it on stage to celebrate the birthday of Empress Elisabeth in1876 and then again in 1888. This play was published in a book in 1877 (Bogataj-Gradišnik 1984: 139)

28 Except for the entry in the repertoire, no information was found about the writer or her work.

29 Years of birth and death are unknown.

30 Eight works written by Fernán Caballero, published in 1860s have been preserved in the National and University Library in Ljubljana: La familia de Alvareda (1860), Lagrimas (1860), Clemencia, novela de costumbres (1863), Cuadros de costumbres (1865), Cuatro novellas (1866), Cuentos y poesias populares Andaluces (1861), La Farisea, las dos Gracias y otras novelas escogidas (1867), Élia, ó La España treinta años ha; El ultimo consuelo; La noche de navidad; Callar en vida y perdonar en muerte (1864). Based on the examination of accession protocols (Accessions – Protokol der Studienbibliothek in Laibach, 1861–1890), the Library acquired eight books of this Spanish woman writer in 1879, meaning they were available in Spanish to Slovenian readers already in the 19th century, although the knowledge of Spanish was at the time more an exception than the rule.

31 See publications in periodicals.

32 “Kristusove legende.” Slovenec 185 (1909): 5.

33 It was published by Janez Giontini. In his library’s catalogues from 1861, the Italian and German translations of this American novel were listed: La capanna del zio Tom o vita de’ negri al mezzodi degli stati uniti d’America (published in 1853) and Onkel Tom’s Hütte; oder, Negerleben in den Sklavenstaaten (published in 1852, 1853 and 1856). The German translation was also listed in the catalogues between 1853 and 1860, while the Slovenian translation wasn’t found in any catalogue.

34 “Nemški napisala ***.” This verb form in Slovene indicates a female subject.

35 Kristan, Etbin. “Ljudmila. Roman.” Ljubljanski zvon 7 (1887): 447.

36 Stare, Josip. “V hrvaški književnosti.” Ljubljanski zvon 3 (1890): 187.

37 Journal of political Catholicism supporters in Slovenian Styria.

38 The first newspaper of Slovenian immigrants in the USA.

39 No other information was found on the author.

40 Mir (1882–1920) was a journal of Slovene Carinthians.

41 Naša moč was a Catholic workers paper founded by J. E. Krek in 1905. In his paper, Krek published numerous translations and original works.

42 No information was found on Irma Blood and Sara Bernard. Sara Bernard was probably the Slovenised name of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923).

43 Gradnik also wrote social poems.

44 See the list of Ada Negri’s poems translated into Slovene: Toroš in Gradnik 2008: 691.

45 Pajk, Pavlina. “Cesarica Elizabeta.” Slovenski list, 52 (1898): 291.

46 The original poem begins with: “O breite deine Arme aus”.

47 The original poem begins with: “Ob gross, ob klein erscheint, was wir gethan”.

48 “Srce ali pamet! Težka je voliti” (Kveder 2010: 449).

49 The idea of the new woman was created by the 19th century feminism and it denoted a positive representation of femininity, however, in the then prevailing feminist discourse that drew on various impulses (from literature – novels on the new woman, decadent literature, socialism, imperialism, and the discourse on homosexual identities; Ledger 1997: 3), it gradually started acquiring negative connotations. In trivial literature and satirical magazines, such as the English magazine Punch, the new woman was subjected to ridicule and presented as a violent Amazon woman who races around on her bicycle, smokes cigars and, as part of her free-time fun activities, destroys men. In the works of some other authors, she was presented completely differently - as someone who suffers from neurasthenia and is being supressed by the society (Richardson – Willis 2011: 13). The new woman was modern and weird, adored and despised, she was rebellious and adaptable, morally clean and promiscuous.

50 “Ne smemo upoštevati le tega, kar je bilo kanonizirano, saj je bilo kanonizirano le tisto, kar je bilo v interesu moči, ne pa vsa dejanskost; treba je pobrskati za razpokami in robovi, za drobnimi, včasih komaj opaznimi pokazatelji, ki pa povzročijo, da se ta, ideološko obarvana podoba dobe spremeni”. (Virk 2008: 236) On the outline of the new historicist approach see also Vaupotič (2005).

51 The ear of the dress of the portrayed woman resembles the vulva and Fineman connects that with Lacan – the eye is the imaginary, the mouth represent the symbolic, and the ear is the realistic and also sexually marked.

52 In his study on Hinko Smrekar, Karl Dobida states that it is a gingerbread biscuit shaped as a heart, even though this is not totally apparent, considering the usual shape of a gingerbread heart (Dobida 1957: 40)

53 The caricature was displayed in the main Ljubljana street, in the store of the bookseller and publisher Lavoslav Schwentner. This is reported by the writer’s daughter Vladoša Jelovšek in her letter on January 11, 1913: “Your caricature is displayed here in Ljubljana, at Šventner’s in Prešeren Street. (Tucovič 2006: 85)

54 “Zadostuje mu le neznatno pretirano preoblikovanje, le skromno poudarjanje značilnosti, pa že doseže želeni učinek, ki pa ga podkrepi kopica opisujočih nadrobnosti. V tem gre včasih tudi predaleč, tako da postane marsikatera karikatura brez obširnega besednega komentarja nejasna ali celo nerazumljiva.” (Dobida 1957: 19

55 In his study of the work of the first Slovene female writer Josipina Turnograjska, Mira Delavec notes that in Turnograjska’s prose the most common noun is “heart”. (Delavec 2009: 155) In The Mystery of a Woman, the words that occur most frequently are soul (38 times) and love (22 times).

56 Ebba Witt-Brattström sees the book Wir Frauen und unsere Dichter (1895) as a systematic feminist reading of female images in the works of male authors which was published as much as seven decades before the first noteworthy work of the second wave feminism that dealt with this topic, namely the book Sexual Politics (1968) by Kate Millett.

57 Nils Kjaer Iaments (1870–1924), a Norwegian playwright, writer, essayist, and literary and theatre critic.

58 Karl August Tavastjerna (1860–1898), a Finnish writer who wrote mostly in Swedish.

59 Hermann Bahr (1863–1934), an Austrian writer and playwright.

60 Felix Dörmann (1870–1929), an Austrian writer, libretto writer and film producer.

61 Dr. Max Runge (1849–1909), an obstetrician and gynaecologist and the author of the books Die Krankheiten der ersten Lebenstage« and »Lehrbuch der Geburtshülfe.

62 Dr. Hans Kurella (1858–1916) was a psychiatrist, he was a student of Cesare Lombroso and he translated his works into German.

63 Dr. Heinrich Kraft (?) was the director of a women’s hospital in Strasbourg.

64 Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English medical doctor, an eugenicist, and a writer who studied human sexuality.

65 Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), an Austrian playwright whose plays mostly dealt with the morality of the bourgeois circles, especially women.

66 She was an Austrian countess, and Anastasius von Gruena’s niece. In La Nouvelle Revue, she published the French translation of the novel Komtesse Muschi by an Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_traductrices_et_traducteurs_de_litt%C3%A9rature_germanique#N (accessed 23.11. 2015), she translated Hungarian folk songs (Ballades et chansons populaires de la Hongrie, 1891), for which she received the award of the French Academy, she was a friend of Barbey d’Aurevilly, and corresponded with Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola.

http://www.kalliopeverbund.info/de/query?q=ead.addressee.gnd%3D%3D”11691047X”&lang=de&htmlFull=false&fq=ead.pers.index%3A(“Nemethy%2C Emmy de”)&lastparam=t, accessed 23.11.2015), Sarah Bernhard, she wrote to Nietzsche in 1892. In 1892, she met Hansson and Strindberg in Paris. In France, she promoted (and previously translated) many Scandinavian authors, especially in the book Nouvelle scandinaves (1894, published by the A. Langen publishing house). She also translated Wedekind’s Spring Awakening into French (Fovet 2010: 266).

67 The influence of decadent literature on Laura Marholm is discussed in Marilyn Scott (1980: 91). Scott lists German poet and writer Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) as someone who strongly influenced Marholm.

68 “Tudi mali slovenski narodič s svojo razmeroma jako razvito in bogato literature premore v krogu svojih literatov nekaj vrlih ženskih zastopnic. Ako se njihova, bodisi pesniška bodisi prozajiška dela ne morejo meriti z deli kake duhovite Ade Negri ali George Egertonove ali Neere ali G. Sandove ali Lavre Marholmove ali Sonje Kovalevsky, ne more noben pameten človek radi tega grajati naših pisateljic.” (Govekar1897: 8).

69 Slovenka, Književnost in umetnost 10 (1897): 15.

70 Slovenka, Književnost in umetnost 16 (1897): 7–8.

71 In the issue 24, the editor revealed that the author of the text was a German writer Ernst Heilborn (1867–1942) and that the German original article was published in the magazine “Die Frau”..

72 “Ali naj se vendar dvignem in kamenjam? Odveč, kajti ta vešča ugasnila bo tudi brez mojega kamena. Tudi svariti nočem pred njo, kajti kedor tiči v mrežah njenih umetnostij, ni mu pomagati, pač pa svetovati: najbolje mu je, da si takoj obesi kamen za vrat in skoči … v močvirje.” O psihologiji Lavre Marholmove (On the Psychology of Laura Marholm) 23 (1897): 3.

73 “To je v odgovor nekomu, ki mi je pisal v privatnem pismu, ko je jela izhajati Slovenka, naj bi Slovenke pisale à la Marholm. Ker mu nisem na tako smešnost niti odgovorila, objavljam sedaj tem rajši članek veljavnega nemškega pisatelja, katerega je poslovenila naša vrla Marica II. Toliko pa za to, da bi Slovenci ne hoteli posnemati vsake nove bedarije, ki se javlja na tujem polji“ (Ibid.)

74 Kakor Jaz sodim to knjigo Zur Psychologie der Frau’, sklepam, da je pisateljica hotela biti le originalna, saj sama gotovo ve najboljše, da ne bo reformovala sveta, kakor tu želi, a n o v o je. Čitatelji sodi po tej knjigi lahko L. Marholmovo na dva načina: Ali se ona čuti tako slabo, kakor nam opisuje ženske - in moškim tudi ne dela baš poklonov, ako izvzamemo to. da bodi mož absolutni gospodar nad ženo; ali pa je ona sama tako popolna in vzvišena, da vidi ves svet tako - piškav. Oni članek je bil le glede te knjige, zato ne govorim.o drugih spisih, mego samo o tem, katerega je nemško ženstvo hudo obsodilo in se meni zdi tudi sicer poln donečih fraz in neumljivih razmotrivanj, toda skrajmo pretiran. (Nadlišek 1897: 11–12)

75 „Če se meni daje na izbira: Marlitt ali Marhohn, bodem jaz vedno še glasoval za prvo, in menim, ne jaz sam.“ (Stritar 1957: 169).

76 Ola Hauson (sic!) in Lavra Marholm v bedi; Slovenski narod 165 (1899) 21.7., 3).

77 Arne Novák (1880–1939) was the son of editor Teréza Nováková (1853–1912). She was a friend of Zofka Kveder.

78 “Nastop modernih polžena, neprijateljic moža, stremečih po moči, važnosti, diplomih in odlikovanjih, kakor jih slika A. Strindberg z zavidanja polnim pesimizmom, ki pa ne zna razlikovati med ekscentričnostjo in zdravo, plodovito emancipacijo. Tiste okoščene, možem sovražne, materinstvo in ljubezen zanikujoče emancipistke, proti katerim se danes pogostoma bojujejo le kakor proti vetrnjačam, so se izlegle v Skandinaviji, kar je seveda prištevati enostranskemu, puritanskemu strogemu značaju dežele. (Novák 1900. 33)

79 “V njenih knjigah je najti akordov, ki bodo polno zveneli v simfoniji nove žene, žene 20. stoletja” (Ibid.: 35).

80 “To poročilo prinašamo, da seznanimo cenjene čitateljice z različnimi naziranji o ženski emancipaciji, dasi seveda nikakor ne soglašamo z idejami Lavre Marholmove. Temeljito je ocenil vrednost Marholminih spisov g. Arne Novák v članku “Nove faze moderne žene”, katerega prevod je prinesla “Slovenka” v II. in III. letošnji številki.” (Lončar 1900: 161)

81 “Des Weibes Inhalt ist der Mann« ima izvestno dokaj resničnega v sebi, a zato naj vendar ne osredotoči ženska vso svojo znanost in umetnost le na izbiranje modernih, navadno malo okusnih toalet, na flirtovanje, na slabo igranje kakega glasbila ter na še slabše govorjenje nemščine in francoščine” (Govekar 1901: 91).

82 “Laura Marholmova, nemška pisateljica, ki je postala slavna vsled svojega nenavadnega dela ‘D a s Buch der Frauen‘, je nedavno zblaznela. V Monakovem jo je odvedla policija mahoma in proti volji njenega moža, — švedskega pisatelja Ole Hamsona (sic!), — v blaznico. — Marholmova razkriva v svojih spisih z uprav umetniškim zanosom in z umetniškimi barvami, polnimi najfinejših nijans, žensko dušo. Naj bi tudi Slovenke čitale njeno najboljše delo ‘D a s Buch der Frauen’ ter prelepo, čustva bogato knjigo ‘Zur Psychologie der Frau’. L. Marholmova se je poizkušala tudi v leposlovju, toda na tem polju ni imela tako lepih vspehov” (Laura 1905: 40).

83 Alenka Jensterle Doležal writes about the decadent traits in Zofka Kveder’s texts and points to Kveder being influenced by Przybyszewski and in V. Jelovšek (Jensterle Doležal 2014: 103).

84 “Na svetih žrtvenikih so gorele krvave ženske duše. Milijarde. Iz vseh vekov, iz vseh svetov so vrele naše duše k velikemu darovanju.” (Kveder 2005:11)

85 “Vsak živi atom našega telesa gori v sveti, čisti ekstazi molitve, čaščenja, želje po Njem! Pojdite! Berite v molitvenikih naše ljubezni pijana čustva! Berite! Me ženske – dekadenti! Me ženske – nadljudje! (Kveder 2005:15)

86 “Ne vse in ne za vse – a nekaj strani ženske duše in ženske usode sem skušala napisati za nekatere” (Kveder 2005: 9).

87 The similarity is obvious if compared to the German original: “Kein Mann nahm sie in seine Arme und weckte ihr ganzes Saitenspiel zum Tönen.” (Marholm 1895: 173)

88 “Moja duša je bila kakor harfa. Kakor harfa z razglašenimi strunami. Tisoč tonov je spalo v strunah, a nikdar niso splavali v svet. […] In tedaj si prišel Ti – Ti umetnik. Kakor sonce si bil in vse je vzklilo. Dotaknil si se strun in zapele so nebeške himne in moje srce je vztrepetalo od sreče. Ti, Ti sveti umetnik moje duše.” (Kveder 2005: 54)

A. Jensterle Doležal sees Jelovšek’s influence in the following lines: “Music has a special meaning in his poetry collection and musical motifs bear a lot of meaning. (Jensterle Doležal 2014: 105)

89 “Tvoja ljubezen je lila name, tvoje oči so tajale mojo mrzloto in privreli so vsi studenci mojega bitja. Vroča, hrepeneča čustva so poplavila mojo dušo, moja kri je kričala: Ti! Ti! Ti! Zakričala je in vsi nervi so zatrepetali, in želje so se, kakor ognjena lava, razlile po čisti goloti mojih čustev. In iz oči mi je zasijalo hrepenenje, in vsa Jaz sem gorela od želja.” (Kveder 2005: 26)

90 “Življenje je gorelo v njej. Bila je stara štiriindvajset let, mlada, sveža in vse v njej je nekaj hotelo, jo nekam sililo. Ljubila je, ljubila je z vso silo, zavednostjo, z vsemi močmi zrele žene. Ne z ljubeznijo angela, niti z umazanostjo živine, ampak z zdravo, močno ljubeznijo človeka. Včasih se je bala te svoje ljubezni. Bila je vzgojena v predsodkih in potrebovala je sankcije za svoja čustva …” (Kveder 2005: 52)

91 “Teta Olga je jokala gori v podstrešni sobici nad seboj in svojim življenjem brez cilja in vsebine – in nad lepim rumenim mačkom, ki se je zopet enkrat izgubil…” (Kveder 2005: 38).

92 “Njena duša je bila zadrhtela v prvem dihu ljubezni. A zdaj je obledela in zvila se je kakor rožast svilen papir, kadar mu sonce odvzame barvo. In bila je spet kakor roža brez duha in barv.” (Kveder 2005: 48)

93 “Ne da bi se strinjal z vsemi deli te knjige. Takoj motto, ki ga je Kveder izbrala, mi ne ugaja. Laura Marholmova ni poznavalka ženskega življenja, temveč je o njem samo fantazirala in tiste besede, ki jih Kveder citira: ‘Das Weib hat kein eigenes Schicksal – es kann auch nicht Schicksal werden – je mehr es Weib ist, desto mehr wird der Mann sein Schicksal’, te besede so kljub vsej važnosti, ki jih obdaja, prav naivna laž. Kolikor je beseda ‘usoda’ sploh opravičena, ni odvisna od spola, temveč od značaja, od volje, sploh od mnogih različnih lastnosti osebe, individua, ravno tako in včasih še bolj pa od zunanjih razmer. Kakor mož ima tudi žena prav lahko svojo lastno usodo in sicer ne le, če je svobodna, temveč tudi v zakonu in kakor je mogoče, da upliva mož na njeno usodo, tako upliva ona često na njegovo neredko tako močno, da bi se lahko reklo: Ona je njegova usoda. Druga je stvar, da so razmere življenja za ženo prav pogostoma – ali tudi ne vselej – bolj neugodne, kakor za moža. Gospa Laura Marholm ima v teh rečeh jako nazadnjaške nazore. Sploh pa ne razumem, kaj ima ta motto s celo knjigo opraviti? Zofkine lastne črtice se mi vidijo vsekakor mnogo bolj zanimive in tudi več vredne.” (Kveder 2005: 468)

94 “A Saša Timofejevna, hči Španjolca neznanega imena, je dalje govorila v svoji graciozni frivolni maniri. […] Vsak dih, vsak gibljaj njenega vitkega telesa se je videl skozi svilo. Kakor kretnje lepe, izzivajoče mačke je bilo njeno premikanje in oči so se pol ironično pol laskavo vsesavele v oči Farinellija in njegovih drugov.” (Kveder 2010: 432–433)

95 “Ha, ha! Čemu misliti nanj? In potem, kaj mora res vsaka ženska giniti za moškim, za ljubeznijo moža, kaj je to res edini, najlepši cilj ženske?! Predsodki! Starinazori, ki so zaradi večnega pokoravanja postali zakoni. (Kveder 2010: 437)

96 “Sonja ni imela drugih ciljev. Medicina, medicina! Prosim, kaj še več! Začetek in konec! Medicina! […] Medicina je bila Sonji Ivanovni sveto božanstvo, ki je zavzemalo popolnoma vse njeno mišljenje, njene želje, upe, vse njeno čustvovanje.” (Kveder 2010: 438–439).

97 “Ali glej, jaz toliko zahtevam od ljubezni, toliko! Tako neizmerno mnogo hočem od moža, a Farinelli mi ne more dati vsega, kar hočem, in morda sploh nihče na svetu. In potem jaz sama in vse, kar imam, vsa moja duša, vse to ni tako dragoceno, da bi moglo zadovoljiti njega. Vem, da ne. In vendar sva bogata oba. Nedvignjeni zakladi leže v njem in v meni. Ko bi jih mogla zamenjati! Ali vidiš njegovo bogastvo ni za mojo dušo in moje bitje stoji pred njim na drugačni, njegovi tehtnici. On je individum in jaz sem spet drugi individum. In kolikor bolj je razvit posameznik, toliko težje mu je razmerje do drugih. Vsak si zasnuje v sebi svoj svet in čim bolj razvit in popoln je kot oseba, tem bolj se bo razlikoval od drugih. Vidiš, zato pomeni najina ljubezen s Farinellijem resignacijo.” (Kveder 2010: 499–500)

98 Ona je bila prevelika egoistka, da bi mogla najti sreče v ljubezni. Ničesar ni dajala, kar se ji ni vračalo. Delitve ni poznala, njej je bila mera le neskončnost in te neskončnosti čustev ni našla nikjer, tudi svojih ni dajala nikomur. Ona ni hotela izživeti svojega življenja v navadnem, tesnem okviru žene. Ona je vedela, da bi ne osrečila nobenega moškega, kakor tudi nihče ne bi osrečil nje, predobro je poznala razlike in kontraste svojega živega, strastnega temperamenta. Včasih ji je pač bruhnila iz srca divja strastna želja po ljubezni, a prav tako hitro je izginila v ogromnem horizontu njenih želj, iz katerih si je hotela sestaviti življenje, bogato raznoterosti in menjave. (Kveder 2005: 172)

99 “Me ljubiš? Slišiš! Me ljubiš, me ljubiš tako, kakor hočem jaz? Brezmejno, ognjeno, nežno, fino, strastno, vzvišeno ? Jaz ne vem, kako hočem, da me ljubiš, samo duša mi ve. Ta duša, ki se je bojim, ki je prevelika zame.Me ljubiš? Iz ust bi ti izpila odgovor, iztrgala ti ga iz srca, ukradla ti ga iz duše. Iz oči bi ga brala, slišala ga iz glasu. V dimu bi ga čutila in slutila ga iz sfere, ki te obdaja. In vedela bi in verjela in duša bi mi bila mirna.” (Kveder 2005: 90)

100 In this story, the author talks about a meeting with a young female student of painting. The girl confides in her and tells her that she is sad because her professor – whom she loves – just got engaged to someone else. This event is shown only as an episode, since the young painter, unlike her predecessors, as a “new woman” doesn’t view love as the only important thing in one’s life. The city makes it possible for her to realize her talents and cheer up, so this disappointment in love is not a major turning point in her life.

101 Liza in Telegrafistka fascinates her friend’s husband with her mind and her sensuality, She has known him for a while, as he was a friend of brother’s but he never noticed her. Only after sharing his life with gentle Milka, who never wants to try and fulfil his expectations regarding her intellectual skills, Viljko becomes aware of Liza’s lucidity and worldliness: “There was this strange, hard-to-define kind of expression on this dark and interesting face. Some grand, unexpressed pride, and at the same time some quiet, desperate resignation. He’s never noticed before how interesting and beautiful Liza in fact is. Her eyes are stern but an intense light in them spoke of a supressed fire in her soul.” (Kveder 2005: 210) Liza captures his heart with her being different and her complete erotic devotion. The writer is direct and explicit in the descriptions of her love ecstasies.

102 In a short story Ena iz množice (1901) (One in a Crowd), Kveder, speaks of a woman who is stylized into a decadent lover, an image that fascinates men. Her Paula is a bored, spoiled and hysterical (the author intentionally uses this, at the time, very popular and trendy word) girl from an upper class of the society, so she can channel a lot of her energy into dealing with herself: “She was a new type of woman. Tall, pale, skinny, and of a translucent complexion, of delicate and high-strung nerves and lively. She was fed up with everything, but still craving for something new.” [“Bila je pravi tip novomodne ženske. Velika, bleda, suha, prozornega obličja, nežnih živcev, žive narave. Vsega je bila nasičena do vrha, a vendar vedno lačna novega”] (Kveder 2010: 651). Paula is obsessed with her wish to be loved and she connect this wish with her appearance: “Sometimes she would stand in front of a mirror and undo her hair and let it hang loose across her face. She looked at herself pleased at what she saw and whispered: ‘Oh, a real decadent lover.’ She was beautiful with her soft features and her pale, almost translucent skin.” [“Včasih je stopila pred ogledalo, razpletla lase in pustila, da so ji razmršeni viseli preko obraza. Z ugajanjem se je opazovala v zrcalu in šepetala pri sebi: “Oh, prava dekadentska ljubica. Bila je lepa s svojimi nežnimi potezami in bledo, skoraj prozorno kožo.”] (Kveder 2010: 656)

103 “Govorili smo o neki pisateljici. ‘Ne ugaja mi,’ je rekel nekdo. ‘Ona nikdar ne da sebe, svojega srca, svoje duše. Kje je ona, prosim Vas?! Njene oči so izgorele in ničesar več ni na njihovem dnu; njeni pogledi tekajo kakor detektivi strogo in hladno okrog in iščejo, odkrivajo. A kje je ona, kje je njena duša, kje je njeno srce, kje je njen smeh, kje so njene solze? Ne najdete jih, ne najdete!’In drugi so pritrjevali: ‘Da res, ne najdemo jih. Ona je talent, izboren talent, toda premalo ima poguma ali preveč ponosa, da bi nam dala več kakor ta svoj talent; duše nam ne da in njene oči so v resnici hladne in molčeče, kakor samostanska okna v osamelih ulicah. Ali to danes ne zadostuje, danes, ko razlivamo našo srčno kri okrog, ko z bolečim veseljem trgamo zadnje zavoje s svoje duše!’

‘Ne zadostuje, ne zadostuje!’ so ponavljali in nekateri so pripravljali besede, da ogrdijo to pisateljico, molčečo in nepristopno.

Tedaj pa se je oglasila moja prijateljica, moja prijateljica, ki ima sanjave oči in globoko dušo, in rekla je tiho in plaho :

‘Ne zadostuje?! Ne zadostuje, da hodi za nami in pobira naše solze, da zbira naše vzdihe, in da nam shranjuje

naš redek smeh?! Nehvaležni smo, nehvaležni mi vsi.’Zardela je, povesila oči in celo popoldne ni rekla niti ene besede več.Ko sem šla sama domov po prašni cesti in ko sem prišla na breg, trudna in potna, sem se ozrla in takrat se mi je zazdelo, da vidim iti spodaj visoko žensko s hladnimi in iskajočimi očmi. Pripogibala se je in iskala je v cestnem prahu solze vseh teh, ki so šli po tej mučni cesti pred njo. Pobirala je te solze in vsako je shranila v svojem srcu. In ko je prišla bliže, sem videla, da tudi iz njenih hladnih, ugaslih, iščočih oči padajo solze na cesto. Padajo te velike bridke solze iz njenih iščočih oči na cesto, a ona gre dalje in njene noge hodijo po njenih bleščečih solzah in jih pokrivajo s sivim, umazanim cestnim prahom. Gre dalje in se pripogiba k zemlji in vsako tujo solzo, ki jo najde, shrani v svojem srcu.” (Kveder 2005: 440–441)

104 “Da življenje ni sama sladkarija, da ga ni človeka brez hibe, da ni luči brez sence in da je prav tako, ker bi se človek drugače od same medice zadušil.” (Kveder 2013: 346)

105 The map uses today’s countries and borders, which would need to be corrected by using a number of historical maps. However, the information presented in the interface would thereby greatly increase, and require a new solution. Note also that the visualisations are prototypes and excercises in visual language, it was not possible to proofread all texts.

Contents

Introduction

From Passing References to Inspiring Writers:the Presence of Foreign Women Writers in the Press, Libraries, Theatre Performances and in the Works of Slovenian Authors

Periodical Press

Lending Libraries and Private Collections

Leopold Paternolli’s Library Catalogues (1833, 1834, 1854)

Janez Giontini’s Library Catalogues (1846, 1851, 1853, 1856, 1860, 1861, 1865)

Hedwig von Radics’s Library Catalogue (1898)

Catalogue of the General Women’s Society Library (1905)

Catalogue of the Public Library of the Economic and Educational Society of the Ljubljana Court District (1916)

Francesco Grisoni’s and Janko Kersnik’s Private Collections

Comparison between Catalogues and Collections

Repertoire of Slovenian Theatres 1867–1967

Translations

Stand-alone Publications

Serialised Publications in Periodicals

Reception of European Women Writers in Slovenian Literary Works

George Sand

Quotations, Paraphrases, Works and Names of Other European Women Writers in Slovenian Literary Works

Influence of European Women Writers on Slovenian Writers: Similarities between Foreign and Slovenian Literary Works

Influence of Greek Metrics on Slovenian Poetry

Ambiguous Views on Femininity in the Writings of Two “New Women” in the Fin de siècle: Zofka Kveder’s Inspirational Encounters with Laura Marholm’s Modern women

Visualization of the WomenWriters Database: Interdisciplinary Collaboration Experiments 2012 – 2015

The Project Framework

Digital Humanities Methods and Genres, and the Theory of New Media

Creating an Argument in the Form of a Digital Artefact

The Uses of Visualization

Organizing a Digital Humanities Project: three Models of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Generative Digital Humanities Methodology – the Advantages of Integration of Scholarly Practices into the Pedagogical Process

Visualization Principles

The Visualizations

The Second Collaboration Model

Conclusion

Bibliography

Contributors