Today is International Women’s Day and one way to celebrate is to visit the newly launched website dedicated to Nordic women writers. The site spans 1000 years of literature and features hundreds of articles on 800 writers. “The story begins in Iceland during the transition from oral narrative tradition to the introduction of written culture. And it ends with a chapter on Sami and Greenlandic women’s conquest of written language in our own time.”
Karen Blixen, 1923. Better known in these parts as Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa
Aside from in-depth pieces on particular writers the website also includes material on topics such as psychoanalysis, salons, suicide and why women were trapped between new and old sexual ethics.
The website is based on Elisabeth Møller Jensen’s seminal multi-volume work Nordisk Kvindelitteraturhistorie (The History of Nordic Women’s Literature).
Ásta Sigurðardóttir
As to why the creation of a new digital platform Jensen says “The history of Nordic literature is full of women writers who wrote for their lives and who fought for public recognition. We hope that the new online platform will be a stepping stone for Nordic women’s writers to reach the position within literary history they are entitled to.”