Feminize Your Canon: Cora Sandel

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From The Paris Review:

“In everything one writes,” said the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, “there is woven in a thread from one’s own life. It can be so hidden that nobody notices it, but it is there and it must be there, I suppose, if it is to be seen as a piece of living writing.” Sandel, born Sara Fabricius in Kristiania (now Oslo), tried to avoid undue conjecture on her fiction’s autobiographical basis by using a pseudonym. When she published her first novel, Alberta and Jacob, in 1926 at age forty-six, she gave her publisher no author photo, nor did she ever agree to be interviewed on television. The two other books in the acclaimed Alberta trilogy appeared shortly thereafter: Alberta and Freedom in 1931, and Alberta Alone in 1939. After Alberta and Jacob drew a wide and appreciative Scandinavian readership, an uncle wrote to her in Sweden, where she was living, to tell her: “I have just read a book by a woman who calls herself Cora Sandel. Everyone here says that it is you.” He had always known, he added, that she would achieve something significant.

The demands placed on today’s authors, the all but mandatory self-disclosure and endless media promotion, would have horrified Sandel. “I have always been of the opinion,” she said, “that no more needs to be expected of an author than she should write books.” Though she lived in Paris for fifteen years she didn’t, on principle, engineer an encounter with Colette, whom she idolized and whose novel The Vagabond she translated into Norwegian. “I considered it too presumptuous to have friends arrange a meeting—Colette was forced to meet so many people anyway.” Sandel valued solitude above all, and spent long hours in silent contemplation of the precise words she needed to capture a mood or sentiment. In the final novel of the trilogy, the eponymous writer-heroine reflects of her manuscript: “Each word had come floating up singly from the unknown depths, where the truth hides itself and then rises again, in different guise, unrecognizable as a dream, but irrefutable.”

The Alberta trilogy follows “fire-worshipper” Alberta Selmer from her frustrated, shame-blighted adolescence in a freezing province of northernmost Norway, to a hand-to-mouth yet infinitely freer vie bohème in left-bank Paris, then to a relationship, motherhood, and finally a return to Norway, where she chooses a precarious independence and commits to becoming an author. “She had finished groping in a fog for warmth and security … She would go under or become so bitterly strong that nothing could hurt her anymore. She felt something of the power of the complete solitary.” Even by the standards of early twentieth-century Modernism, Sandel’s themes—the tyranny of feminine beauty ideals, the sacrifice of safe respectability for artistic fulfillment and emotional freedom, the perilous renunciation of patriarchal frameworks—were revolutionary. The fiercely individualistic Sandel did not wish to be part of an official women’s movement. But aesthetically and politically, her novels count as feminist classics, with Alberta at the era’s literary vanguard alongside Clarissa Dalloway, Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam, and Djuna Barnes’s Robin Vote.

. . . .

No amount of hunger or loneliness is worse than the claustrophobia and entrenched narrow-mindedness of her hometown, depicted so viscerally in Alberta and Jacob. Made to feel “ugly, boring, hopeless and impossible,” not least by her mother, Alberta can never entirely shake off her self-disgust, her apprehension that she is unworthy as a woman. But at least in Paris she is more at ease, less judged. “Was she ugly?” she muses. “Probably. But here in Montparnasse people wandered about with snub noses and many kinds of facial faults and were quite acceptable.”

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

Here’s a link to Cora Sandel’s books