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310
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
The new impulse given to her literary talent is shown
in her description of travel in " From Modern London ";
in the above-mentioned drama, " A Charity Fair," and
in " True Women," published in English by S. French,
London.
This drama, which seemed to have been written in favor
of the emancipation of married women, was really the
outcome of the author’s pity for the domestic troubles of one
very dear to her. After its publication many regarded her
as a despiser of men, an amazon thirsting for battle ; but
they would have become aware of their mistake had they
seen the tears in the author’s eyes when she received the
thanks of her friend for her expressions of noble
indignation, a feeling which was a force in her writings, and was
not the cold indignation proper to persons who only regard
fictitious life from within their four walls, but the warm
resentment against the wrongs of actual sufferers.
In 1886 our author published a romance entitled "A
Summer Story," which has quite lately been translated and
published in German, and which, more than any other
of her productions, contains the personal feelings of the
writer.
In this tale love already begins to appear as an actual
force in human existence, as a thing that has tyrannous
rights able to balance all other intellectual exigencies.
Here still these intellectual exigencies triumph, and love is
enslaved, but in all the life of Ulla, the heroine of the
romance, there is a lament and homesickness for the very
love which she would conquer and trample upon, but which
destroys the balance of her existence, and condemns her to
a continual and sterile struggle between her old self and
the new spirit born within her, because the latter is not so
fully incorporated with love as to give it the victory over
the former state of feeling. This story shows that a woman
who sacrifices love to personal dignity—a sacrifice of which
the writer nevertheless approves — can never be happy.
In the biography of Sönya Kovalévsky, now before the
reader, Anna Carlotta Leffler relates the circumstances of
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