C. J. L. Almqvist
1793–1866
Biography
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist was born in Stockholm in 1793 and studied at Uppsala University. He worked for a time as a clerk in Stockholm, and in 1824 he joined friends in a rural experiment in northern Värmland, inspired by Rousseau, where he also married. Back in Stockholm he ran an experimental school from 1829 to 1841. He was ordained a priest in 1837 but found no parish work, and after his novel of 1839 he gave up the clergy altogether, living by journalism for several newspapers.
He wrote novels, poems, essays on poetics, a Swedish grammar and music, and much of his work appeared in the long series Törnrosens bok, published between 1832 and 1851. His views on society and politics were radical. In the novel Drottningens juvelsmycke the central figure, Tintomara, is neither male nor female and draws both men and women into love. Church and state denounced him as a dangerous revolutionary, yet he is still counted among the leading Swedish social reformers of the nineteenth century. In 1851 he fled Sweden on suspicion of fraud and of attempted poisoning, and he went to the United States under an assumed name. In 1865 he tried to return, got no further than Bremen, and died there in 1866, still under another name.
Det går an (1839) is the Almqvist book on this site, and it is his most famous work. A sergeant falls in love with Sara Videbeck, a glazier's daughter he meets on a steamboat between Stockholm and Lidköping, and she sets out her own ideas about an equal marriage. The novel's unmarried couple and its questioning of marriage made it controversial, and it appeared in English as Sara Videbeck in 1919.
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Books
Det går an
by C. J. L. Almqvist
On a steamboat leaving Stockholm, a young sergeant falls into conversation with Sara Videbeck, a glazier's daughter travelling home to Lidköping, and they journey on together across lakes and country inns. Almqvist's short novel of 1839 caused a scandal, because Sara has her own…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.