Fredrika Bremer

Fredrika Bremer (17 August 1801 – 31 December 1865) was a Finnish-born Swedish writer and reformer. Her Sketches of Everyday Life were wildly popular in Britain and the United States during the 1840s and 1850s and she is regarded as the Swedish Jane Austen, bringing the realist novel to prominence in Swedish literature. In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV for emancipation from her brother's wardship; in her 50s, her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all unmarried Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden's first female tertiary school. It also inspired Sophie Adlersparre to begin publishing the Home Review, Sweden's first women's magazine as well as the later magazine Hertha. In 1884, she became the namesake of the Fredrika Bremer Association, the first women's rights organization in Sweden. Early life Fredrika Bremer was born into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family on 17 August 1801 at Tuorla Manor in Piikkiö Parish outside of Åbo, Sweden (now Turku, Finland). She was the second daughter of five and the second child of seven of (1770–1830) and Birgitta Charlotta Hollström (1777–1855). Her grandparents Jacob and Ulrika Fredrika Bremer had built up one of the largest business empires in Swedish Finland but, upon his mother's death in 1798, Carl liquidated their holdings. (A few years later, the Finnish theater of the Napoleonic Wars would see Finland annexed to Russia.) When Fredrika was three years old, the family moved to Stockholm. The next year, they purchased Årsta Castle, about distant from the capital. Fredrika passed the next two decades of her life summering there and at another nearby estate owned by her father, spending winter in the family's Stockholm apartment. Fredrika and her sisters were raised to marry and became socialites and hostesses within the upper class like their own French-trained mother. They were given the education then conventional for girls of their class in Sweden, with private tutors followed by a family trip through Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands in 1821 and 1822 before their social debuts. She was a talented miniaturist and studied French, English, and German.