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Famillen H***
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
239 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1830
11 people are currently reading
198 people want to read
About the author
Fredrika Bremer
351 books18 followersFredrika Bremer was a Swedish 19th century writer and one of the earliest and perhaps most influential women rights activist in the country.
Born into a wealthy family in the Swedish speaking parts of Finland Bremer recieved a thorough education including a Tour d'Europe.
In 1828 she she started to publish her series Teckningar utur hvardagslifvet (Drawings from the everyday life), in which her story Familjen H... (The Family H...) was included. The work drew influences from the English 'novel of letters', as well as the utilitism of Jeremy Bentham and the works of Freidrich Schiller. The work was widely acclaimed and she continued her writings by publishing Grannerna (The Neighbours) and Hemmet (The Home).
Inspired by Alexis de Tocquevilles she travelled to the United States by herself and stayed for over a year. Bremer was dissapointed by the experience since she could not condone with policies such as slavery. She was however somewhat influencal in the US at the time, having many of her works translated by Mary Howitt, and she was mentioned in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Her most important work would be Hertha. The book caused such a major discussion about the role of women in society that the Swedish parliment decided to grant unmarried women over 25 years of age legal majority. It also lead to the foundation of all women higher education schools.
Born into a wealthy family in the Swedish speaking parts of Finland Bremer recieved a thorough education including a Tour d'Europe.
In 1828 she she started to publish her series Teckningar utur hvardagslifvet (Drawings from the everyday life), in which her story Familjen H... (The Family H...) was included. The work drew influences from the English 'novel of letters', as well as the utilitism of Jeremy Bentham and the works of Freidrich Schiller. The work was widely acclaimed and she continued her writings by publishing Grannerna (The Neighbours) and Hemmet (The Home).
Inspired by Alexis de Tocquevilles she travelled to the United States by herself and stayed for over a year. Bremer was dissapointed by the experience since she could not condone with policies such as slavery. She was however somewhat influencal in the US at the time, having many of her works translated by Mary Howitt, and she was mentioned in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Her most important work would be Hertha. The book caused such a major discussion about the role of women in society that the Swedish parliment decided to grant unmarried women over 25 years of age legal majority. It also lead to the foundation of all women higher education schools.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
March 13, 2016
Opening with a glorious scene that sounds enticingly like Christmas, all snow and sleighs and abundant food (it’s actually February), The Colonel’s Family is a nineteenth-century novel rather unlike any other I’ve read. It does have known features, some of which are rarely seen in one place: high, stormy Romanticism, the strait-laced propriety of the Improving Book, early feminist polemic, and sentimentalism. (The author took pains not to be overly sentimental, and metafictionally tells us so, but to a 21st century cynic she still is a bit.) And all is bound in a curious uneven structural form – including the odd scene set out as a play - that feels entirely contemporary. Fredrika Bremer has been described as the Swedish Charlotte Bronte; to an extent I can understand why: the Romanticism, the feminism, the absurdly unlikely romances I rolled my eyes at – but the unconventionality of the book as a whole, combined with the obscurity and cultural tourism, and the wholeheartedness with which we are thrown into each subgenre made it much more interesting to me. As a modern pastiche novel, I would have had little time for it, but as a historical artefact it is fascinating; it’s easy to see why this book is studied (and perhaps a shame that it is not studied more outside Scandinavia).
The structure, which can at times feel like a series of linked short stories in different styles about the family members, came about because Bremer’s publishers insisted on receiving sections of the book before subsequent ones were finished (as the Afterword describes). My liking for the book may be similar to the way in which I prefer naïve art, like the painting on the cover*, to conventionally “good” nineteenth century portraits.
The extreme shortage of opportunities for women outside marriage is exemplified by the narrator, Beata [translated surname Workaday] an intelligent woman from a middle class background who in England in 1830 would most likely have been a governess. In Sweden she has a role translated as a "family adviser", a paid companion who also takes on practical duties as required, moving socially between the family and the staff, a sort of household PA. Three major characters get married during the course of the novel and in each case before any wedding takes place, the woman makes a stand about her lack of power to choose who her husband is, or her involuntary dependence on her husband for economic and social standing after marriage. Some Swedish women had the vote in the 18th century – the period during which Bremer was writing was actually somewhat regressive.
The early family scenes were reminiscent of the wholesome cosiness of The Vicar of Wakefield - a novel which the afterword confirms was an influence on Bremer. Emilia’s extreme anxiety about marriage – related to her friends’ bad experiences, and implicitly her lack of rights – has an effect on the household and a psychological verisimilitude not unlike Natasha in War and Peace.
Everything still seems more or less cosy though, until a tidal wave of Romanticism hits with the backstory of the Colonel’s blind, depressed niece Elisabeth. In her past wishes to assert a more masculine form of thought and existence for herself, combined with high emotion and obsessive devotion to love (to many modern sensibilities these sound contradictory to one another, but in the Romantic Movement they were not) - minus the late-onset physical disabilities, she sounded much like accounts of Karoline von Günderrode a friend of writer and Goethe disciple Bettina von Arnim**, or even some of Mary Wollestonecraft.
Elisabeth exists in contrast to the Beth March / Pollyanna Whittier figure of Helena, her hunchbacked cousin who is forever cheerful and helpful. For some while I thought I saw the religious implication that those with disabilities should happily accept their lot as god's will. However, considerable compassion is shown Elisabeth by narrative and characters, and although she cannot know it, she has fared better in Sweden than she probably would have at the time even in another European country. Rather than blaming her for failing to accept her lot gracefully, upbringing - as well as the limited roles allowed to women – is indicated as a cause of her unhappiness. Helena's family intentionally lavished love and gifts on her to make up for her lifelong disability. Elisabeth, whose blindness in any case had a later onset, was neglected and shipped around as a child, in a way now known to have a particularly adverse effect on those with [genetic] sensitivity. Although Bremer seems to have some understanding of the role of upbringing, (it is not entirely consistent given the example of the sweet Cinderella Hermina, to whom no-one was kind before she met her beau) there is an implied belief in the novel that women’s mental health problems would be entirely alleviated by improved rights and recognition in society - although it is also clear that very solid characters like Beata are held back by their lack of rights too.
Other, minor, characters are examples of friendly families egalitarian for their time, or of strong middle-class women. (One of these takes a whip to a cheeky peasant lad who sings bawdy songs on the road. I daresay Bremer wouldn’t be any fonder than many contemporary internet posters of my interpretation of the embarrassing controversy over catcalling as, partly, a class issue, but she certainly provides a flagrant example.)
The Colonel’s Family is mostly a book of eventual happy endings, most of them laughably unlikely, but as well as a possible satire on sentimental romantic novels of the period, these could be seen as Bremer’s way of creating a fictional community slightly more utopian – but not unimaginably so – than the world she actually had to live in.
* "Painting by an unknown artist from the 1830s, National Museum of Finland." ." I love old portraits generally, and the slightly rustic / "naïve" style of this one. The way the cat appears to be clawing the girl's dress, caught in a photographic moment of trying to escape the sitting; the perfect shading of the arms; the hairstyle (regional?), unusual with this type of well-to-do dress (from a British perspective); the too-wide classical column looking out on to fjords. The girl's face is also uncannily like that of a girl I knew when I was a kid.
** I know about these two thanks to Immortality by Milan Kundera, a book which otherwise wasn’t that great.
The structure, which can at times feel like a series of linked short stories in different styles about the family members, came about because Bremer’s publishers insisted on receiving sections of the book before subsequent ones were finished (as the Afterword describes). My liking for the book may be similar to the way in which I prefer naïve art, like the painting on the cover*, to conventionally “good” nineteenth century portraits.
The extreme shortage of opportunities for women outside marriage is exemplified by the narrator, Beata [translated surname Workaday] an intelligent woman from a middle class background who in England in 1830 would most likely have been a governess. In Sweden she has a role translated as a "family adviser", a paid companion who also takes on practical duties as required, moving socially between the family and the staff, a sort of household PA. Three major characters get married during the course of the novel and in each case before any wedding takes place, the woman makes a stand about her lack of power to choose who her husband is, or her involuntary dependence on her husband for economic and social standing after marriage. Some Swedish women had the vote in the 18th century – the period during which Bremer was writing was actually somewhat regressive.
The early family scenes were reminiscent of the wholesome cosiness of The Vicar of Wakefield - a novel which the afterword confirms was an influence on Bremer. Emilia’s extreme anxiety about marriage – related to her friends’ bad experiences, and implicitly her lack of rights – has an effect on the household and a psychological verisimilitude not unlike Natasha in War and Peace.
Everything still seems more or less cosy though, until a tidal wave of Romanticism hits with the backstory of the Colonel’s blind, depressed niece Elisabeth. In her past wishes to assert a more masculine form of thought and existence for herself, combined with high emotion and obsessive devotion to love (to many modern sensibilities these sound contradictory to one another, but in the Romantic Movement they were not) - minus the late-onset physical disabilities, she sounded much like accounts of Karoline von Günderrode a friend of writer and Goethe disciple Bettina von Arnim**, or even some of Mary Wollestonecraft.
Elisabeth exists in contrast to the Beth March / Pollyanna Whittier figure of Helena, her hunchbacked cousin who is forever cheerful and helpful. For some while I thought I saw the religious implication that those with disabilities should happily accept their lot as god's will. However, considerable compassion is shown Elisabeth by narrative and characters, and although she cannot know it, she has fared better in Sweden than she probably would have at the time even in another European country. Rather than blaming her for failing to accept her lot gracefully, upbringing - as well as the limited roles allowed to women – is indicated as a cause of her unhappiness. Helena's family intentionally lavished love and gifts on her to make up for her lifelong disability. Elisabeth, whose blindness in any case had a later onset, was neglected and shipped around as a child, in a way now known to have a particularly adverse effect on those with [genetic] sensitivity. Although Bremer seems to have some understanding of the role of upbringing, (it is not entirely consistent given the example of the sweet Cinderella Hermina, to whom no-one was kind before she met her beau) there is an implied belief in the novel that women’s mental health problems would be entirely alleviated by improved rights and recognition in society - although it is also clear that very solid characters like Beata are held back by their lack of rights too.
Other, minor, characters are examples of friendly families egalitarian for their time, or of strong middle-class women. (One of these takes a whip to a cheeky peasant lad who sings bawdy songs on the road. I daresay Bremer wouldn’t be any fonder than many contemporary internet posters of my interpretation of the embarrassing controversy over catcalling as, partly, a class issue, but she certainly provides a flagrant example.)
The Colonel’s Family is mostly a book of eventual happy endings, most of them laughably unlikely, but as well as a possible satire on sentimental romantic novels of the period, these could be seen as Bremer’s way of creating a fictional community slightly more utopian – but not unimaginably so – than the world she actually had to live in.
* "Painting by an unknown artist from the 1830s, National Museum of Finland." ." I love old portraits generally, and the slightly rustic / "naïve" style of this one. The way the cat appears to be clawing the girl's dress, caught in a photographic moment of trying to escape the sitting; the perfect shading of the arms; the hairstyle (regional?), unusual with this type of well-to-do dress (from a British perspective); the too-wide classical column looking out on to fjords. The girl's face is also uncannily like that of a girl I knew when I was a kid.
** I know about these two thanks to Immortality by Milan Kundera, a book which otherwise wasn’t that great.
December 2, 2024
Allt som allt 3/5. Den var väldigt lättläst och författaren har roliga kommentarer genom hela boken. Men den är inte så värst dramatisk så den blir aldrig riktigt fängslande som vissa andra böcker. Helt okej!
September 24, 2020
Detta var en bok som i ärlighetens namn inte var särskilt rolig eller på något sätt resonerade i mig. Det mest underhållande är språket och ironin som understundom blossar upp. Inte sagt, dock, att romanen inte är intressant. Familjen H** har mängder av litterära och historiska kvaliteter som gör den läsvärd för den litteraturintresserade. Det är ett centralt och intressant arv ur den svenska litteraturhistorien och den lämpar sig väl att diskutera utifrån genre, teman, samt vad den säger om dåtidens (boken utspelar sig 1829 utanför Stockholm) klassamhälle, könsroller, syn på kärlek, moral eller för all del ’romanen’ som fenomen.
Beata Hvardagslag är vår berättare, som anländer som en vän till en rik familj bosatt utanför Stockholm för att b la. hjälpa till med ett stundande bröllop. Vi får följa tre separata kärleksdramat:
- Den mellan den tvivlande dottern Emilia som är förlovad med den korrekte och mycket äldre Algernon
- Julie, som bryter sin förlovning och förälskar sig i Professor L***
- Sonen Carl, som förälskat sig i en kvinna som beundras av familjen, men där kärleken dem emellan anses omöjlig till följd av hennes familjs olämplighet. Carl blir senare kär i den blinda fosterdottern Elisabeth.
Romanen är lika mycket en dokumentär metaroman som en (ofta ironisk) dialog med samtiden och Familjen H*** anses av många ha varit den som lade grunden för den svenska romanen. Språket är både högstämt och lågmält och ofta humoristiskt. För tiden traditionelle genrer blandas friskt då romanen i sig kan sägas vara en familjeroman, eller vad vi idag kanske skulle kalla släktkrönika, en kärleksskildring eller en bildningsroman. Texten innehåller dessutom såväl brevväxling som lyrik och sång.
Jag rekommenderar som sagt till den litteraturintresserade, men för den som bara vill fångas av en dramatisk historia så kan det bli lite svårsmält eller tradig läsning.
Beata Hvardagslag är vår berättare, som anländer som en vän till en rik familj bosatt utanför Stockholm för att b la. hjälpa till med ett stundande bröllop. Vi får följa tre separata kärleksdramat:
- Den mellan den tvivlande dottern Emilia som är förlovad med den korrekte och mycket äldre Algernon
- Julie, som bryter sin förlovning och förälskar sig i Professor L***
- Sonen Carl, som förälskat sig i en kvinna som beundras av familjen, men där kärleken dem emellan anses omöjlig till följd av hennes familjs olämplighet. Carl blir senare kär i den blinda fosterdottern Elisabeth.
Romanen är lika mycket en dokumentär metaroman som en (ofta ironisk) dialog med samtiden och Familjen H*** anses av många ha varit den som lade grunden för den svenska romanen. Språket är både högstämt och lågmält och ofta humoristiskt. För tiden traditionelle genrer blandas friskt då romanen i sig kan sägas vara en familjeroman, eller vad vi idag kanske skulle kalla släktkrönika, en kärleksskildring eller en bildningsroman. Texten innehåller dessutom såväl brevväxling som lyrik och sång.
Jag rekommenderar som sagt till den litteraturintresserade, men för den som bara vill fångas av en dramatisk historia så kan det bli lite svårsmält eller tradig läsning.
December 7, 2024
En helt okej bok! Kändes inte som att något speciellt hände direkt men boken var ändå underhållande och välskriven.
February 26, 2024
2,5 stjärnor
June 9, 2019
Would rate it at 3.5 stars if I could. An early Swedish classic realist novel, it's quite charming and the writing style and voice is delightfully cheerful, the stories of the family it describes told in a lively manner. Yet it's also very disjointed, probably because it is such an early work in the novel genre, and it understandably has the values of its time, which among other things leads to a horribly clichéd (and in modern terms ableist) depiction of a blind person that didn't sit easy with me. I read this in an 1882 Finnish translation from Project Gutenberg, and the Finnish was... very weird many times. It was interesting from the perspective of the history of Finnish as a literary language, but this isn't the best place to go on about it.
January 21, 2016
A story about a rich family in Sweden in early nineteenth century.
It was alright, somewhat unstructured and fragmented (hello romanticism), and just alright.
It was alright, somewhat unstructured and fragmented (hello romanticism), and just alright.
February 12, 2018
Detta var Sveriges första realistiska roman, trots att den kom ut så sent, ty svenskarna var sena på tåget, och trots att den idag i bästa fall hade betraktats som sentimental adelsromantik. Berättelsen tar fart efter ungefär 100 sidor och tappar igen mot slutet. Huvudpersonen i den enda intressanta sidointrigen tillskärs en alltför snål bit av romanen innan hon helt försvinner. I princip alla andra karaktärer är måttligt till rejält irriterande existenser. Ändå är det i högsta grad läsvärt. Fredrika Bremer har både språket och berättarglädjen på sin sida.
November 1, 2021
This was one of the books for University, and it was, perhaps, the most boring book I've read. I'm not a huge fan of realism in books, but this "takes the cake".
I'm not going to read it again.
I'm not going to read it again.
February 14, 2023
Verket drivs av den otroligt synliga författarens ironi över sig själv och berättelsen - handlingen i sig är en sak men det som gör verket bra är just berättarens roll. Och jäklar var Elizabeth sa words of truth
November 6, 2024
"Gud välsigna dig med din kalops...." säger Julie till Arvid
Blev faktiskt överraskad över hur mycket humor Bremer använder sig av när hon skriver. Jag skrattade faktiskt högt vid ett flertal tillfällen (en av dem är citatet ovan).
Blev faktiskt överraskad över hur mycket humor Bremer använder sig av när hon skriver. Jag skrattade faktiskt högt vid ett flertal tillfällen (en av dem är citatet ovan).
September 1, 2020
Om det var den första romanen så var det ändå bra jobbat.
December 1, 2020
Den första svenska romanen. Startskottet för så mycket. Ett revolutionärt verk i sin tillsynes anspråkslöshet.
January 31, 2021
”Romanläsningen är för själen hvad opium är för kroppen.”
January 14, 2023
Helt ok. Men inte riktigt min stil kanske😁
Gillade dock att de skildrade många olika karaktärer med olika historier.
Gillade dock att de skildrade många olika karaktärer med olika historier.
November 5, 2023
Bokens berättare var väldigt rolig vilket förhöjde upplevelsen väldigt mycket. Dock var själva huvudberättelsen inte så engagerande. Intressant stilistiskt!
December 3, 2023
Spretig och intetsägande. Kanske lite hård. Den är inte dålig. Bara inte att jag diggade vad den försökte göra.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews