The date and the laureate
The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature was Selma Lagerlof of Sweden, in 1909. It was not a 1967 event. The 1967 literature prize went to the Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, who is mentioned here only to fix the date, and a woman had been honoured with this prize nearly six decades earlier.
By 1909 only two other women had received a Nobel Prize in any field: Marie Curie, for physics in 1903, and the peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner, in 1905.
Background
Selma Lagerlof was born in 1858 at the family estate of Marbacka in Varmland, in western Sweden, and she died in 1940. She had a childhood illness that affected her ability to walk, and she grew up on stories told by relatives about the region and its people. Those stories fed her later writing.
She trained as a teacher and worked in that profession for some years while writing in her spare time. Her family’s estate was sold after financial difficulties, and she later managed to buy it back, a story that is often retold, though the details are best treated with some caution.
Gosta Berling’s Saga
Her first major book was Gosta Berlings saga, published in 1891. It is a long, episodic and romantic story set in Varmland, centred on a defrocked clergyman and a group of cavaliers living on a great estate. The book mixes realism with legend and folk tale.
The book had a mixed reception at first but soon became a cornerstone of Swedish literature. It made her reputation and helped her earn a grant that allowed her to leave teaching and write full time.
Nils Holgersson
Her other best-known work is the children’s book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, usually called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, published in 1906 and 1907. It was commissioned as a geography reader for Swedish schoolchildren. In it a boy is shrunk to a tiny size and travels across Sweden on the back of a goose, learning about the country’s landscape, wildlife and people.
The book succeeded far beyond its original purpose. It was widely translated and has remained popular as a classic of children’s literature, and its place in her reputation was strong by the time of the prize.
What the Swedish Academy cited
The Swedish Academy awarded her the prize in 1909, and its citation spoke of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterised her writings. The wording is often quoted because it captures the qualities for which she was admired: her imaginative handling of legend, her feeling for landscape, and her moral seriousness.
The Academy’s choice was in line with the early years of the prize, when the committee often favoured writers seen as idealistic. The prize was a major honour for a woman writing in a small language, and it brought her international attention. In 1914 she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy itself, the body that awards the literature prize.
Writing and public life
Lagerlof was active in public life as well as in her writing. She took part in the Swedish women’s suffrage movement, and she gave speeches in support of the cause. Women’s right to vote in Sweden was settled around 1919 to 1921, within her lifetime.
She continued to write for decades after the prize, including novels and memoir-like works about her childhood. She spent her later years at Marbacka, which she had been able to reclaim, and her home there is now a museum.
The women who followed
The next woman to win the literature prize was the Italian writer Grazia Deledda, honoured in the 1920s, and she was followed by others such as Sigrid Undset of Norway. Over the twentieth century the list of women laureates grew slowly but steadily. In 1966, the year before 1967, Nelly Sachs shared the prize, an indication that women were still a small minority among laureates in the mid-1960s.
Literary context in 1967
The year 1967 was one of rich literary activity: it saw the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a landmark of magical realism, and its Latin American setting links to the 1967 laureate, Asturias, who is often linked to that tradition too. The 1967 novels in general reflected a shift towards experimentation, but that is a different story from the one told here.
Lagerlof’s own work belongs to an older, more folkloric tradition. Her place in Nobel history is secure as the first woman to win the literature prize, and as the writer whose Nils Holgersson is still read widely today. The category that she opened has since included many of the world’s best-known women writers, and the history of other literary honours, such as the Pulitzer fiction winners, offers a useful comparison for readers who are interested in how women’s recognition developed in different countries.