Fredrika Bremer
(born August 17, 1801,
Abo
, Swedish
Finland
[now Turku, Finland]?died December 31, 1865, Arsta, near Stockholm) was a writer, reformer, and champion of women’s rights; she introduced the domestic
novel
into
Swedish literature
.
Bremer’s father was a wealthy merchant who settled the family in
Sweden
when she was three. She was carefully educated and, as a young woman, travelled extensively in Europe. After her father’s death, her private means enabled her to devote her life to
social work
, travel, and writing. Her quiet domestic novels such as
Familjen H***
(1830?31;
The H? Family
; also translated as
The Colonel’s Family
),
Grannarna
(1837;
The Neighbours
), and
Hemmet
(1839;
The Home
) were popular at home and abroad, with English translations produced during her lifetime by the poet Mary Howitt. Bremer visited the
United States
, where she was welcomed in
New England
as a kindred spirit for her antislavery
sentiments
. She met
Ralph Waldo Emerson
,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne
and wrote about her impressions in
Hemmen i den nya verlden
, 3 vol. (1853?54;
The Homes of the New World
). Her later novels
Hertha
(1856) and
Fader och dotter
(1858;
Father and Daughter
) deal with the social effects of the assertion of women’s rights.