LAGERLÖF, Selma (author). Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige. Forsta Bandet [and] Andra Bandet. [The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. First and Second Series].

Travelling Through Sweden by Goose – By the First Woman Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

LAGERLÖF, Selma. Nils Holgerssons underbara Resa genom Sverige. … första [–andra Banddet]. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlag. 1906-1907.

Two volumes, 8vo. Publisher’s pictorial green wrappers, both vols priced to spine (Haft 3:50; Inb. 5 and Haft 3:50; Inb. 7) with publisher’s device, partly uncut; I: pp. [iv], 237; II: pp. [iv], 486, [2]; with numerous halftone photographic plates; wrappers slightly rubbed, a few small chips to extremities, spines chipped at head and foot (30 mm loss to foot of vol. I), vertical creasing to spines; internally very good; a handsome set, rare in the original wrappers and remarkably so in this condition, known in only a handful of copies.

First edition, extremely rare in the publisher’s printed wrappers, of Nils Holgerssons underbara Resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), the beloved children’s book by the queer, disabled writer, educator, and suffragist Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), the first female Nobel laureate for literature.

Lagerlöf, an advocate of Swedish spelling reform, first conceived Nils Holgerssons underbara Resa in response to a 1902 request for a new geography primer for schools by the Swedish National Teachers’ Association. It was one of the earliest works to adopt the new spelling system introduced with the 1906 royal order standardising orthography used in primary schools and the lower three levels of secondary schools. The eponymous Nils, shrunk to the size of a thumb by a vengeful elf, relates travels through Sweden on the back of a goose, with historical and geographical facts about the country’s various provinces embedded throughout.

Her work, formatted for use in schools, was simultaneously issued in wrappers (as here) and in pictorial cloth; the fragility of the version in wrappers makes it extremely rare in commerce; the few copies we have traced have had one or both wrappers bound into a later binding. All subsequent printings appeared solely in cloth. The success of Nils Holgerssons underbara Resa was instrumental in the decision to award Lagerlöf the Nobel Prize 10 December 1909, making her the first woman – and the first Swede – to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1991 she became the first woman to be depicted on a Swedish banknote, the twenty-Kronor note (replaced by Astrid Lindgren in 2016), an example of which is loosely inserted. Lagerlöf was affected by lifelong hip dysplasia and at the age of three fell ill, causing paralysis of her legs; although she regained the ability to walk, she encountered difficulties with mobility and walked with a limp for the rest of her life, deliberately slowing her pace to make her limp less obvious. ‘It is this disability that has forced me to sit still, to look within myself, and that is the reason I became a writer. If I had been healthy like everybody else, I should probably have become the wife of some factory manager (“bruksförvaltare”)’ (trans. De Vrieze, p. 36). She stipulated that her love letters to women should not be published until fifty years after her death; she exchanged over three thousand letters with her longtime partner, the Swedish-Jewish writer Sophie Elkan, published in 1993 as Du lär mig att bli fri (You Teach Me to Be Free); they travelled together to Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, and Palestine. Elkan was the dedicatee of Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem, in which she is described as the author’s ‘companion in life and letters’.

See De Vrieze, Fact and Fiction in the Autobiographical Works of Selma Lagerlöf (1958); ‘Selma Lagerlöf’, in Nobel Lectures (1969).

SKU: 2110259