Lagerlöf's letters to Sophie Elkan, You Teach Me to Be Free (Du lär mig att bli fri), published in 1992, tell a passionate love story that began in 1894 and apparently remained the most important relationship of Lagerlöf's life until Elkan's death in 1921. A writer from a Jewish merchant family in Gothenburg, Elkan accompanied Lagerlöf on trips to Italy, Jerusalem, and Egypt. Lagerlöf dedicated her novel Jerusalem I (1901) to "Sophie Elkan, my companion in life and letters." Other women, however, also competed for the novelist's favors. Valborg Olander, who taught at the teacher's college in Falun, was probably Elkan's most important rival. Lagerlöf's relationship with Olander precipitated scenes of jealousy, according to the letters.

Sponsor Message.

Did Selma Lagerlöf's love for women affect her writing? The love stories in her novels are heterosexual, but they frequently focus on the conflicts and ambivalences of love and the transgression of boundaries. Her earliest writing portrays Margareta Celsing's forbidden love for Altringer in Gösta Berling's Saga (1891). In this work, any person who kisses Gösta Berling runs a risk of being ostracized.

In Lagerlöf's canon, the course of true love never runs smoothly; book after book dramatizes the obstacles to love. In The Outcast (Bannlyst [1918]), for example, the hero is a banned man, who at last finds his love. Unlike in other parts of Europe, the 1864 Swedish law against homosexuality included women. Homosexual relations between consenting adults were not legalized until four years after Lagerlöf's death. The legal and social stigma associated with homosexuality surely affected her work and probably accounts for her recurrent concern with ostracism and outcasts.

In the short story "Downie" in Invisible Links, written in 1894 (the year she first met Sophie Elkan), Lagerlöf uses a very telling expression, "That which she dares not call by name," when dealing with the forbidden love between a young woman and her fiancé's uncle. Lagerlöf's story precedes by a few months the poem by Lord Alfred Douglas that contains the familiar line referring to homosexuality as "the love that dare not speak its name."

It may well be that Lagerlöf picked up the phrase during her visits to Copenhagen while she was a teacher in Landskrona in southern Sweden (1885–1895). In her letters to Elkan during the period in which she wrote the story, Lagerlöf observes "many relations between women" on her visits to the Danish capital. It is possible that the expression "the love that dare not speak its name" was widespread within the homosexual subcultures of Europe at this time, and that Lagerlöf, like Douglas, picked it up and used it as a cover in her writings.

A liberal and democratic kingdom, Sweden has a reputation for sexual openness, yet it maintains a law that punishes buyers of sex from prostitutes.

Same-sex love in Swedish literature is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, and recently gay and lesbian publications have appeared in significant numbers.

Lord Alfred Douglas is remembered today for his tumultuous association with Oscar Wilde and as a minor poet.

Best known for her series of children's books about the Moomin family of trolls, Tove Jansson, considered a national treasure in Finland, also wrote fiction for adults and was an accomplished artist and illustrator.