Ellen Key, whose most important book is here for the first time presented in English, is no stranger in the English-speaking world. Her Century of the Child has already found many appreciative readers in America as well as in England. Ellen Key is descended from a Scotch Highlander, Colonel M’Key (probably of the famous MacKay clan) who fought under Gustavus Adolphus, and she attaches no little significance to this ancestry. She has always interested herself in English matters, and is well acquainted with the life and literature of Great Britain; but she belongs first and foremost to Scandinavia.

She was born in 1849 in the Swedish province of Smaland, on a country estate of her father. He had played a distinguished part in the Swedish parliament as an avowed radical, but his wife was a representative of an old and noble family. Ellen, their eldest child, was marked from an early age by her love of nature and of natural things. This devotion to nature may be considered hereditary, for her great-grandfather was an ardent disciple of Rousseau, and a special admirer of Rousseau’s famous treatise on Education. He gave to his son the name of Émile, which was handed down to Ellen Key’s father. It was perhaps owing to the Rousseau tradition that the young girl was initiated from childhood in swimming, rowing, riding, and other exercises then usually reserved for boys. At the same time, she loved music and devoured books including Scott’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays. An early enthusiasm was for Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea; it may be said, indeed, that the ideal of natural, beautiful, and harmonious living for which that book stands has never left Ellen Key. She was educated for the most part at home by German, French, and Swedish teachers, but it may easily be believed that a girl of so much individuality of character, so impetuous and so independent, proved a difficult child to manage and was often misunderstood. One may divine as much from the sympathetic attitude towards children and the reverence for their healthy instincts, which are revealed in The Century of the Child. Fortunately young Ellen had a wise and discerning mother, to whom she owed much; with a fine intuition, this mother overlooked her daughter’s indifference to domestic vocations and left her free to follow her own instincts, at the same time exercising a judicious influence over her development. While still a young girl, the future author, inspired by BjÖrnson and other Scandinavian writers, conceived the idea of devoting herself to the study of the condition of the people and wrote several novels on peasant life. A remark of her mother’s—that her daughter surely could not be meant to write novels, because the main questions for her were “the questions of her own soul”—opened her eyes to the truth that fiction could not be her vocation. But she was very far from knowing what her life’s work was to be, and her dreams were of love and motherhood, not of a career.

With BjÖrnson she was throughout in friendly relationship. He had recognised her fine abilities before she even began to write, and she on her side was full of admiration for his genius, strength, and goodness. The other world-famous writer of Scandinavia Ellen Key learned to know through his work at the age of eighteen, when her mother presented to her Love’s Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt; this also was an influential event in her life. Among writers to whom she was later attracted were Elizabeth B. Browning, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin.

At the age of twenty-three, Ellen Key began those constant excursions to all the great centres of Europe, which may be said never since to have ceased, at first in the company of her father, whose secretary, confidant, and almost co-worker she had become, and she was thus gradually led to writing for journals. A love of art seems to have been a primary inspiration of these early journeys, for at this time Ellen Key was fascinated by the art of painting as she has always been by the greater art of living, and her wide knowledge of pictures has often happily illuminated her later writings. After 1880, however, when her father, as the result of an agricultural crisis, lost his property, she was compelled, at the age of thirty, to choose a career and for a time became a teacher in a girls’ school. She had always been attracted to teaching and many years earlier, at the instigation of BjÖrnson, had studied the school system of Denmark. At a later period she gave courses of lectures in literature, history, and Æsthetics. For twenty years she occupied the Chair of History of Civilisation in Sweden at the Popular University of Stockholm.

The early years of her career as a teacher seem to have been a period in Ellen Key’s life of much struggle, hardship, and mental depression due to personal sorrows. Amongst these were the deaths in rapid succession of several distinguished women with whom she was closely associated, Sophie Kowalevsky, Anna Charlotte Leffler, and (by suicide) Ernst Ahlgren. She had not yet reached full development nor found her true place in the world. Although her abilities, when she was still a girl of twenty, had been discerned by a distinguished Swedish woman’s rights advocate, Sophie Adlersparre, who encouraged her to write for her journal, she has always been shy and diffident, with none of the self-confident qualities, which an outsider might be tempted to attribute to her, of an imposing Corinne. She published no book till she had reached middle-age—most of her best books belong to the present century—and though she had so far overcome her timidity as to discuss literary and Æsthetic questions before a public audience, she had yet scarcely touched openly on those dangerous and difficult questions which arouse fierce antagonisms. It required some assault on her most cherished convictions to arouse her latent courage. This occurred when an old Swedish law against heresy was revived in order to send to prison some young men who had freely argued the consequences, as they conceived them, of the Darwinian doctrine in religion and sexual morals. There is nothing so sacred to Ellen Key as the right to personal opinion and personal development; the sight of any injustice or oppression has always moved her profoundly, and on this occasion she sprang forward into the fray like a lioness in defence of her cubs. She is, in the opinion of Georg Brandes, “a born orator,” and she publicly brought her eloquence to the service of the cause she had at heart. Her discussion of the question was marked by moderation, skill, and learning, but her attitude on this occasion served to define publicly her real position. Thenceforward the conventionally respectable elements of Swedish society felt justified, according to the usual rule, in dealing out reckless and random abuse to the daring pioneer. She, on her side, retained her serenity, remaining a true woman, with much of the mother in her and something of the child, but before long her literary activities developed along her own native lines, and in full maturity she frankly approached the essential questions of life and the soul. A considerable series of volumes began rapidly to appear, often rather informal in method and personal in style, but freely following the author’s thought and feeling, full, not only of ardent enthusiasm but of fine intuition and mellow wisdom. In 1903 was begun the publication of her most extensive work, Lifslinjer (Lines of Life), of which work the first two volumes constitute the book here presented to the English reader. A few years later appeared The Century of the Child and in 1909 The Woman’s Movement, by many regarded as the best statement which has been made of that movement in its widest bearings. Ellen Key has also published a long series of essays on literary personalities—C. J. L. Almquist, the Brownings, Anna Charlotte Leffler, Ernst Ahlgren, etc.—who have appealed to her as illustrating some aspect of her own ideals. The latest of these is a lengthy study of Rahel Varnhagen.1

Ellen Key is a Scandinavian and may perhaps even be said to be a typical figure of the country whose foremost woman she is. Moreover, she loves her own land and is resolved to spend the rest of her life in a house she proposes to build in a beautiful part of the country, Alvastra, near Lake Wetter, close to the ruins of the first Swedish monastery, a spot already sacred through its associations with the great Swedish saint, Brigitta. But the prophet is a prophet everywhere except in his own country. It is easy to find estimable Swedes who are far from anxious to claim the honour which Ellen Key reflects on their land. It is in Germany that her fame has been made. To-day the Germans, and not least the German women, awaking from a long period of quiescence, are inaugurating a new phase of the woman movement. The first phase of that movement dates from the eighteenth century, and its ideals were chiefly moulded by a succession of distinguished English women who claimed for their sex the same human rights as for men: the same right to be educated, the same right to adopt the occupation they were fitted for, the same political rights. In the course of a century these claims, although not yet completely realised, have gradually been more and more generally conceded as reasonable.

At the same time, however, it began to be seen that these demands, important as they are, by no means cover the whole ground, while, taken separately, they were liable to lead in a false direction; they tended to masculinise women and they ignored the claims of the race. In their ardour for emancipation, women sometimes seemed anxious to be emancipated from their sex. Thus it was not enough to claim woman’s place as a human being—especially in an age when man was regarded as the human being par excellence—but it also became necessary to claim woman’s place in the world as a woman. That was not, as it might at first seem, a narrower but a wider claim. For on the merely human basis women were reduced to the level of competitive struggle with men, were allowed to bring no contribution of their own to the solution of common problems, and, worst of all, their supreme position in the world as mothers of the race was altogether ignored. So that the assertion of the essential rights of women as women meant at the same time the assertion of the rights of society and the race to the best that women have to give. It was certainly by no accident that the Germans, who once before led the evolution of Europe by their triumphant assertion of the fundamental human impulses and have since been pioneers in social organisation, should take the leading part in the inauguration of this new phase of the woman movement.

The publication of Ellen Key’s books corresponded in date with the recent tendency of the Germans to bring to bear on the questions of sex their characteristic Teutonic thoroughness and practicality. It is not surprising, therefore, that this Swedish woman, with her many-sided vision of the world, her daring yet serene statement of the secrets of human hearts, should be greeted as the natural leader of the movement on its most womanly side. Love, as Ellen Key regards it, is at the core of the woman question, and these opening volumes of Lifslinger are, above all, a contribution to the woman question, a modern and more mature version of that Vindication of the Rights of Woman which Mary Wollstonecraft had set forth a century earlier.

In England, and the same may be said of America, we are yet but at the beginning of this new phase of the woman movement. We have been mainly concerned with the rights of women to be like men; we are only now beginning to understand the rights of women to be unlike men, rights which, as Ellen Key understands them, include, although they go beyond, the rights embodied in the earlier claims. The dogmatic fanatics of every party, it is true, cannot endure Ellen Key; they cannot understand her, though she understands them, and even regards them with a certain sympathetic tolerance, as we should expect from a disciple of Montaigne and Shakespeare and Goethe. She is many-sided and is quite able to see and to accept both halves of a truth. In one of her earliest essays she showed how individualism and socialism, which some people suppose to be incompatible, are really woven together, and in the same way she now shows that eugenics and love—the social claims of the race and the individual claims of the heart —are not opposed but identical. Similarly, she declares that to build up, to help, to console is the greatest of women’s rights; but, she adds, they cannot adequately exercise that right unless they also possess the right of citizenship—so disconcerting the narrow partisan on each side. In matters of detail we may at many points reserve our opinion. Ellen Key is, above all,—like Olive Schreiner, to whom she is, in some respects, akin—the prophet of a movement which transcends merely isolated measures of reform. Her writings are the candid expression of her intimate self. In this book, especially, we feel that we are in the inspiring presence of a woman whose personality is one of the chief moral forces of our time.

London, September, 1910.

Love and Marriage