ABSTRACT This essay reads narratives of gendered exchange in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) via intersecting vocabularies of entitlement and consent as articulated by Victorian social theorist John Stuart Mill and reframed by modern feminist philosopher Kate Manne. In Eliot’s novel, heroine Maggie Tulliver finds herself bound by conflicting patriarchal scripts that compel her deference to entitled men and punish her for seeking masculine privileges like free movement, formal education, and self-determination. Even more insidiously, Maggie is expected to consent to these harmful social bargains. Unlike typical fallen woman novels of the period, Mill uses conventions of the Bildungsroman to treat Maggie’s ultimate social fall as a near-inevitable outcome of growing up in a society that conditions her to accommodate the masculine entitlements of father, brother, suitor. Eliot highlights Maggie’s impossible dilemma, thus implicating Victorian society in her tragedy. This intervention gains clarity through Manne’s theoretical framing. The essay closes with a reflection on Manne’s concept of “himpathy” – the tendency to sympathize with male perpetrators and blame female victims – as exemplified in the fictional town of St. Ogg’s, which ruthlessly judges its heroine for controverting the patriarchal order.

ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, novels by Mathilde Fibiger (1830–1872), Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), and Fredrika Runeberg (1807–1879) promoting women’s rights became a starting-point for the subsequent women’s movements in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, respectively. Lutheran arguments were ubiquitous on both sides of the conflict over women’s emancipation. Anti-Catholicism was an integral part of the Nordic nationalist movements, embraced by these authors. Still Fibiger’s Clara Raphael (1851) and Runeberg’s Sigrid Liljeholm (1862) explicitly discuss Catholic forms of female religious authority, whereas Bremer ventured into an extended and personal investigation of the Catholic faith in her travelogue Two Years in Switzerland and Italy (1860/1861). I examine the tension between Lutheran nationalism and Catholic forms of female vocation underlying the arguments for women’s emancipation in Fibiger’s and Runeberg’s novels. Bremer’s travelogue provides a context for the approach to Catholicism in general, and a code to detect traces of Catholic female religious authority in Bremer’s own emancipation novel Hertha (1856). Catholicism is rejected and yet appropriated to reimagine the Lutheran idea of women’s vocation. The conflation of nationalist and religious discourse generates a double calling to women’s emancipation, ultimately portrayed as a sacred mission.

ABSTRACT The life of Kristín Guðmundsdóttir was rather short and thorn-stricken. At the age of 11, she contracted leprosy. The illness quickly took its toll on her, and at the age of 16 she became disabled. In 1898, Kristín was among the first patients admitted to the newly established Leprosy Hospital in Iceland. A collection of poems and hymns composed by Kristín after being admitted there is preserved in a manuscript at the National and University Library of Iceland. Her collection can be viewed as a microcosm or a miniature of the Leprosy Hospital. At the beginning, we are led into this large building and gradually introduced to some of its inhabitants. In her poems, Kristín attempted to strengthen the resilience of those who battled physical ailments and enhance their faith and trust. Simultaneously, Kristín provides invaluable insight into her life, characterised by poverty and illnesses. Despite these challenges, nothing seems to have broken her spiritual strength, joy, and faith.

ABSTRACT The article studies the spiritualist activity of the Norwegian pedagogue, school headmistress, women’s right activist, and publicist Ragna Nielsen (1845–1924) from three overarching perspectives. The first one relates to the discourse on spiritualism and its relationship with the Nordic Modern Breakthrough. In her séances, Nielsen claimed to have communicated with a number of deceased Norwegian intellectuals of that time. Second, the article examines the cross-pollination between Nielsen’s spiritualism and her commitment to the women’s rights movement. Third, the article investigates Nielsen’s use of spiritualism as a vehicle for self-promotion. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s writings in Specters of Marx (1993), here applied to a spiritualistic discourse, the article argues that Nielsen’s spiritualism is a hauntological project that resurrected the Nordic Modern Breakthrough, a cultural, literary, and political movement with which she had a number of scores to settle. In addition, the article argues that Nielsen’s spiritualism creates a peculiar semi-public sphere, in which the private environment of the séance is given a public dimension. As an example of women’s writing, Nielsen’s spiritualistic corpus challenges the Habermasian notion of a public sphere.

ABSTRACT Sophie Elkan (1853–1921) was a pioneering Swedish author who transformed the historical novel by merging psychological nuance with vivid historical settings. Although works such as John Hall (1899) and The King (1904) reveal her skill in depicting complex characters, her contributions remain undervalued due to personal and societal factors of her time. As a Jewish Swede in an era of rising antisemitism and nationalism, Elkan negotiated dual identities that shaped both her life and writing. This article shows that her Jewish background deeply informed her literary vision. In novels like The Dream of the Orient (1901) and From the East and the West (1908), Elkan challenged stereotypes, explored cultural hybridity, and portrayed tensions between Eastern and Western traditions. Her stories examine varied experiences of Jewish identity: “Herr Schwarz” contrasts assimilation with spiritual rootedness, “Expose the Armenian!” critiques Western missionary attitudes, and “Utterly Alone” reflects on personal reconciliation with heritage. Elkan’s secular yet engaged relationship to Judaism mirrored broader challenges faced by Swedish Jews confronting prejudice and pressure to assimilate. By bridging Jewish tradition with Western intellectual frameworks, she broadened discussions of identity and modernity. Her legacy remains vital for understanding literature’s role in cultural and societal transformation in turn-of-the-century Sweden.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Finnish women’s rights movement perceived the relationship between fiction and religion from the late 1880s until the First World War. For this purpose, the women’s press provides a good vantage point. The analysis shows that it was mainstream to award an ideological and pedagogical function to literature – literature was not purely perceived as art. Literature and authors had a duty to contribute to societal development and transformation. Good literature had to serve women’s rights and society’s progress. They were seen as dependent on high moral standards. Fiction had to defend women’s interests – that is, absolute sexual morality – and women writers were expected to put themselves in the service of ideologically correct literature. Christianity, properly understood, was interpreted as a support to progress at all levels of society. Essential in assessing the morality of fiction was to pay attention to how things were described. “Dirty” things could be represented as long as it was done in the right spirit. Women were not alone in the service of progress. The contributions from male authorities with the same message were highly appreciated, and their publications used as a strategy. It was perceived as a joint effort to envision and gradually, realize a woman-friendly future.

ABSTRACT In our article, we tackle nineteenth-century Finnish women writers’ stance towards religious faith, considering both organized religion, and their personal search for spirituality. This century marks the birth of Finnish literature, first in Swedish, then in Finnish. It is the period of “national awakening” that culminated around the turn of the twentieth century, when various social movements entered into dialogue with the national project. Like in all national, social and women’s movements around Europe, religion played an important role. We address this issue with cases from different decades, mapping the historical and political contexts, as well as various literary genres and poetics. The selected writers represent certain milestones in the history of women’s writing in Finland: they begin with Finland’s first women novelists, Charlotta Falkman (1795–1882) and Wendla Randelin (1823–1906), who both wrote in Swedish. Our next case study is Minna Canth (1844–1897), representing the first generation of authors writing in Finnish. Finally, we briefly discuss the socialist politician and writer Hilja Pärssinen (1876–1935). We focus on women writers’ discourses of faith in the process of creating female subjectivity, and opportunities for women’s agency, amidst the rising national movement and women’s emancipation.

ABSTRACT Berte Kanutte Aarflot was one of Norway’s most popular hymnwriters in the nineteenth century, although rarely represented in official church hymnals. Publishing her first book of poetry in 1820 and her collected works in five volumes before her death, Aarflot boldly assumes roles otherwise reserved for men, as preacher and spiritual guide for people who sought her. This article explores the roots of this confidence and agency, especially their indebtedness to the thinking and practices of revivalist preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge, and the women around him. Although his perceivably protofeminist ideas were soon adjusted and even negated by his later followers, and are now often forgotten, Hauge’s doctrines included equality between men and women. I argue that Aarflot’s achievements are a testimony to the Haugian pioneer spirit in her childhood years and see her work as indebted to their women emissaries as well as to her predecessor Dorothe Engelbretsdatter.