Novel
The District Governor's Daughters
Amtmandens døttre
Camilla Collett · 1855
Synopsis
In the house of a district governor, in the mid-nineteenth century, the daughters are brought up only for marriage, the sole security offered to a woman in this bourgeois world. Georg Kold arrives as tutor to the son of the house and becomes close to Sofie Ramm, one of the daughters, intelligent and resistant to what is expected of her. Everything draws them to each other, but the conventions of their milieu make this feeling something that can be neither spoken nor chosen.
Context
The novel appeared anonymously, in two parts, in 1854 and in 1855, and caused a scandal. It is regarded as one of the first realist, political and social novels of the country, directed against forced marriage and in favour of women's freedom to choose. Its author called it “the longest suppressed cry of her life”, and it is seen as bearing the mark of her unhappy love for Welhaven. Kirsten Seaver translated it into English in 1992, and Éric Eydoux into French in 2010.
Who it is for
More than four hundred pages in French, in Éric Eydoux's translation published in Geneva by Zoé in 2010.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first Norwegian feminist novel, it caused a scandal from its anonymous publication, in 1854.
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