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Lagerlof, Selma. The Story of Gosta Berling. Translated from the Swedish . by Pauline Bancroft Flach. London: Gay and Bird, 1898. First edition, U.K. issue with cancel title page (first issued in the U.S. by Little Brown). Octavo, pp. [i-vii] viii 1-473 [474: blank] [475-486: Little Brown publisher's ads, but their pagination is unrelated to their collation -- the first three leaves are part of the main text's final gathering (30), the next two form a conjoined pair, and the final leaf is a fly]. Original olive green pictorial cloth, front panel stamped in gold, black and beige, spine panel stamped in gold, top edge of text block gilt, other edges untrimmed. Old ownership ink signature on half-title. Faint stains on one page-pair (74-75), evidence of a skillful removal of bookplate from front pastedown, still overall a very good copy. #3227. $45. This was the author's first novel. It brought her immediate fame both in her native Sweden and around the world. (A different translation (by Lillie Tudeer) was published in the same year by Chapman & Hall in the U.K. with the title rendered as Gosta Berling's Saga.) She went on to produce an impressive collection of long and short fiction. Her novels tend towards a loose-limbed structure that suits her focus on character, setting and theme rather than plot. The present work follows the wildly fluctuating fortunes and misfortunes of Gosta Berling, a preacher at the story's beginning and a carpenter at the end. Her hero falls again and again into misery through his weakness for liquor and ill-considered sexual liaisons. Passions run high through many of the characters, who are situated in a section of Sweden that was undergoing social and economic upheavals in the early 19th century. As in much of her subsequent fiction (of which at least a half-dozen titles should be considered generically relevant) the supernatural comes and goes in a matter-of-fact manner as pagan traditions rub shoulders, or clash tragically, with Christianity and emerging modernity. The author's treatment of such supernatural incidents is thus highly distinctive, as she does not treat them as abnormal intrusions into everyday reality. ". the folkloristic qualities [in her fiction] -- expressed through supernatural elements and a great sensitivity toward nature -- combine romanticism with a shrewd sociological insight." -- Magill (ed.), Masterplots (1985), p. 1239. Realism and fantasy are woven tightly together in her fictional worlds. "Lagerlof was not aware of contradictions between these two ways of viewing reality." -- ibid, p. 1240. Reginald 08534 (citing the Little Brown edition). Day, p. 50 (citing both). Clute and Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1897), p. 556. Seller Inventory # 3227
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