Novel
Money
Pengar
Victoria Benedictsson · 1885
Opening lines
Byn egde icke mer än en enda gata, om den ens kunde hedras med detta namn, ty den var helt enkelt en mindre väg, utan spår af stenläggning, och oförsvarligt illa hållen.
The village had only one street, if it could even be honoured with that name, for it was simply a minor road, with no trace of paving, and inexcusably badly kept.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
In the late 1870s, in the countryside of southern Sweden, Selma Berg, sixteen, a gifted and lively girl, dreams of entering the art school in Stockholm. The adults around her have another plan: her uncle persuades her to marry a rich landowner much older than she is. Shaken by her wedding night and by the bargain that this marriage is, she finds herself shut up in an idle luxury. She finds comfort with her cousin Richard, her former playmate, and the friendship between them threatens to become a passion.
Context
The novel appeared in 1885 under a male signature, a year after the author's first stories, and it made her a recognised voice of the Scandinavian modern breakthrough, the generation that put marriage and the condition of women up for debate. The heroine has much in common with her author, who had also dreamed of being a painter before being married to a much older man. Sarah Death translated it into English under the title Money, and Vincent Dulac into French in 2019, from Cupidus legendi, with a new edition in 2025.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages in the French translation; it helps to know that a married woman was then under her husband's guardianship.
Prizes and reception
One of the landmark works of Swedish realism, still reissued in Sweden, and the book that made its author known.