Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

1. Sunday 22 July 1888 was a glorious day in Copenhagen, warm and sunny. The city was celebrating an outdoor exhibition of the latest architectural ideas, thousands of people had filled the narrow cobblestone streets, all sweaty and waving the Danish red-and-white flag. The world seemed as beautiful as the future was promising. But for the Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson neither the world, nor the future, registered any more.

2. She had rented a small room in the Leopold Hotel and bought herself a razor knife and a handheld mirror. She’d spent the previous evening writing goodbye letters, then waited for the unbearably slow flow of time to pass midnight. Only then, with the mirror in one hand and the knife in the other, she cut her own throat. The hotel maid found her body in the morning.

3. Details of Benedictsson’s death detonated through the Nordic cultural bourgeoisie. The air was full of fragments of her life; one knew this, and the other that. Famous friends published obituaries in the Scandinavian newspapers, and her portrait was on display in bookstore windows. Speculations as to the cause of her death crossed each other like arrows of gossip.

obituary:[ə'bitjuəri] n. 讣告

4. Bad finances was one theory, unhappy love another. In the scandalous newspaper Aftenbladet, the owner of the Leopold Hotel declared that Mrs Benedictsson was undeniably tense and hysterical. There were two beings in her, he claimed, that fought each other: her father had cultivated a wildness in her nature, while her mother taught her only to pray.

5. Meanwhile, her friend August Strindberg was almost starving. His marriage to Siri von Essen was falling apart, and he lacked a home as well as a steady income after having sunk himself in scandal with his sexually explicit essays. Accused and tried for blasphemy, he’d fled Sweden. Now, exonerated from the charges, he had a hard time finding publishers. He feared for his state of mind, but no one seemed to want him, not even the psychiatrists he consulted.

tried: 这里的try不是“尝试”哦，是“审判”的意思，其名词        trial为更多人所熟知

blasphemy: 亵渎神明 n.

exonerate: [ig'zɔnəreit] v.宣告无罪

6. Strindberg and Benedictsson had become friends in Copenhagen. At first, Strindberg had reluctantly admired her, but when she turned out to be more successful than him (only the fourth woman ever to receive a sizeable grant from the Swedish Academy), his friendliness turned into fierce envy. As soon as he heard about her suicide, he began writing the play of her life, out of, as one friend put it, ‘an unrelenting and cruel cannibalism without the slightest hint of compassion’.

cannibalism: ['kænibəlizəm] n. 同类相食

7. She was born Victoria Maria Bruzelius in the south of Sweden in 1850, at a time when women lacked human rights and the Western world was undergoing relentless change – a time Friedrich Nietzsche(著名的尼采哥)/'ni:tʃə/ later compressed into three words: ‘God is dead.’ With industrialisation came capitalism. The creation of banks and factories followed, amid the birth pangs of communism and liberalism, constantly fighting over people’s minds.

8. As The Communist Manifesto (1848) states with poetic clear sight:

        All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

Frightening times – and strangely polarising, for, if God is dead, what takes God’s place? Science, research, rationality, some answered triumphantly. Loneliness and rootlessness, said others. Or, immorality and capitalism. God is dead, long live modernity!

9. Victoria grew up in a village so small one could blink and miss it on passing through. Her parents were well educated but lacked money. On top of that, they were old. An awkward, lonely child, her mother taught her most of the skills a girl of the bourgeoisie had to know – French, piano, sewing, embroidery – plus all there was to know about God’s truth and punishment. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to be the king of freedom. They would ride over the open fields and he’d teach her to wrestle, whistle and shoot. Galloping to keep up, Victoria duly/'dju:li/ wrestled, whistled and shot, doing her best to be the son her father longed for.

embroidery:[im'brɔidəri] n. 刺绣

10. For a time, both were happy, before a singular moment when everything changed. The sensitive young girl watched her father realize that, indeed, she was not a son. She registered the change of expression in his eyes and interpreted it as rejection and contempt. From that moment, she not only hated being a girl, she despised the characteristics within herself that she identified as feminine, and couldn’t stand women in general.