1 See Duţu, Patraş, and Patraş, who state that exile women in the metropolises assume an in-between position vis-á-vis their linguistic and national belonging, which complicates the inclusion in national canons as well as in transnational accounts. Duţu, Carmen Beatrice, Patraş, Roxana, and Patraş, Antonio, “On Becoming ‘Princess Bibesco’: The Intimacy of Modern Identity, between the Self and the World,” Primerjalna Književost 46.1 (2023), https://ojs-gr.zrc-sazu.si/primerjalna_knjizevnost/article/view/8289/7740, accessed 13 May 2024Google Scholar.

2 In line with the social movement approach, I use avant-garde in the sense of being in the vanguard, both in terms of lifestyle and in terms of ideas and art. In the latter sense, my use is based on Toril Moi’s observation that the break with aesthetic idealism was the major aesthetic turning point of the late nineteenth century. Moi refers to critical materialist realism and naturalism as protomodernisms that were considered new and antitraditional in the late nineteenth century, both in a dramaturgical sense and ideologically, as they separated art from conservative morality. See Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67–8, 82, 100.

3 The New Woman was a fin-de-siècle phenomenon. She was contemporary with the new socialism, the new fiction and journalism, as well as other issues. Hence, she was part of the cultural novelties that manifested themselves in the 1880s and 1890s. Sally Ledger emphasizes the many heterogenous discourses on the “new woman” around the fin de siècle. Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–3. Although New Women in novels and the press were constructed differently, they were connected to several contentious issues, including marriage, maternity, and education for women. There has been argument over when the New Woman was officially born. The expression, however, was coined in 1894 by the authors Sarah Grand and Ouida. Clare Mendes, “The New Woman,” Oxford Bibliographies (2011), www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0045.xml, accessed 20 July 2024.

4 This article is based on research that began in 2014 in two collaborative projects funded by the Swedish Research Council. Both projects are based on extensive archival research. The results so far have been published as chapters in edited volumes and as articles in Nordic Theatre Studies. The essay “Tracing Sanna kvinnor across the Nordic Theatre Landscape: Intermediaries and Forces of Circulation” has recently been published in European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 54.1 (2024): 85–104. In a 2019 anthology chapter, I map the circulation of Leffler’s plays in Europe outside the North and analyze the pattern. This macroanalysis is combined with close readings of the reception of Leffler’s two plays Sanna kvinnor (1883) and Hur man gör godt, skådespel i fyra akter [How good is done, a play in four acts] (1885). See Lindh, Birgitta Johansson [Birgitta Lindh Estelle], “The British, French, and German Reception of Anne Charlotte Leffler’s Plays in a Changing Cultural Context,” in Swedish Women’s Writing on Export: Tracing Transnational Reception in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leffler, Yvonne (Gothenburg: LIR.skrifter, 2019), 205–62Google Scholar. The present article uses new sources, but also some of the material from the earlier book chapter. The analysis of the British reception and use of social movement theory is here extended and deepened. In addition, the contextualization is broadened, and the conclusions advanced by answering questions left open in that chapter.

5 See Calhoun, Craig, “‘New Social Movements’ of the Early Nineteenth Century,” Social Science History 17.3 (1993), 385–427 Google Scholar, at 386–9. The idea of new social movements arose in the late 1960s in relation to movements like feminism, the ecology movement, the peace movement, and the youth movement that worked outside formal institutional channels and emphasized lifestyle, ethical, or identity concerns rather than narrowly economic goals. Analysts contrasted them to the labor movement, which was the paradigmatic “old” social movement, and to Marxism and socialism, which asserted that class was the central issue in politics. Calhoun points to the lack of historicization within social sciences as a cause of the dichotomy between new social movements and traditional ones (386–7).

6 Abby Peterson and Håkan Thörn, “Inledning,” in Alberto Melucci, Nomader i nuet: Sociala rörelser och individuella behov i dagens samhälle [Nomads of the Present (1989)], trans. Gunnar Sandin (Gothenburg: Daidalos, 1992), 10.

7 Melucci, Alberto, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, ed. Keane, John and Mier, Paul (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 29 Google Scholar.

8 See ibid., 75.

9 Ibid., 75–6.

10 Eyerman, Ron and Jamison, Andrew, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21 Google Scholar.

11 Drude Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne: Den danske Rødstrømpebevægelses udvikling, nytænkning og gennemslag 1970–1985, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998), 1: 186; Birgitta Johansson [Birgitta Lindh Estelle], “Befrielsen är nära”: Feminism och teaterpraktik i Margareta Garpes och Suzanne Ostens 1970-talsteater (Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2006), 148.

12 Gunilla Hermansson notes that the readings of other reception texts that define secondary reception are often based on texts that may themselves be secondary or tertiary. When the information of knowledge in such recycled reception is reduced to a minimum, this kind of reception can be called superficial. Gunilla Hermansson, “Julia Nyberg/Euphrosyne: Romantic Poetry, World Literature, and Superficial Reception,” in Swedish Women’s Writing on Export, ed. Y. Leffler, 33–95, at 33.

13 Bennett, Susan, “The Making of Theatre History,” in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, ed. Canning, Charlotte M. and Postlewait, Thomas (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 63–83 Google Scholar, at 67.

14 I have collected the British articles on Leffler and her play from newspapers and periodicals in the British Newspaper Archive, www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, accessed in 2018 and 2024; Proquest Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com, accessed in 2018 and 2024; and HathiTrust, www.hathitrust.org, accessed in 2024.

15 Throughout, I use Sanna kvinnor in reference to the Swedish original and True Women regarding the English translation.

16 Monica Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar: Anne Charlotte Lefflers liv och dikt (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2012), 278, 302, 310–11.

17 Johansson Lindh, “British, French, and German Reception,” 219–20.

18 Brækstad later became a culture attaché in London. Roald Berg, “Hans Brækstad,” Norsk biografisk leksikon, https://nbl.snl.no/Hans_Br%C3%A6kstad, accessed 2 May 2024.

19 According to letters from Henrik Ibsen to Brækstad and to the German socialist Georg von Vollmar in 1890, Brækstad by then belonged to the Social Democratic Party. Henrik Ibsen, letter to Hans Lien Brækstad, 18 August 1890, www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1890-1905ht|B18900818HLB.xhtml, accessed 2 May 2024; Henrik Ibsen, letter to Georg von Vollmar, 22 August 1890, www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1890-1905ht|B18900822GvV.xhtml, accessed 2 May 2024. After meeting Brækstad in 1884, Leffler describes him as “completely radical” [my translation; in the Swedish original, “fullkomligt radikal”] (Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 300).

20 Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 300; Anne Charlotte Leffler [as Anne C. Edgren], True Women: A Play in Three Acts, trans. Hans Lien Brækstad, in Our Corner 4.4–4.6 (October–December 1884): 219–28, 292–302, and 360–6; Leffler [as Edgren], True Women: A Play in Three Acts, trans. Brækstad (London: Samuel French, 1885).

21 “The Reader,” The Graphic, 18 April 1885, 391–4; “Woman’s Rights in Norway,” Woman’s Journal 16.16 (18 April 1885); Blackwell, Alice Stone, “A Woman’s Right Play,” Woman’s Journal 16.21 (23 May 1885)Google Scholar.

22 Anne Charlotte Leffler [as Anne C. Edgren], True Women: A Play in Three Acts, trans. Hans Lien Brækstad (London/New York: Samuel French, 1890).

23 Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 309; “Theatrical Gossip,” The Era, 2 May 1891.

24 Anne Charlotte Leffler [as Anne C. Edgren], “The Doctor’s Wife,” trans. Edward Aveling, Progress (July 1884), 41–6.

25 Kelly, Katherine E., “ Alan’s Wife: Mother Love and Theatrical Sociability in London of the 1890s,” Modernism/Modernity 11.3 (2004), 539–60Google Scholar, at 539–40.

26 See Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 21.

27 “Theatrical Gossip,” The Era, 2 May 1891.

28 This series of theatrical performances started with an unlicensed performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts on 13 March 1891, followed by provocative stagings of matters such as sexuality, family life, and gender relations in microcosmic short-lived experimental forms. See Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 547; Woodfield, James, English Theatre in Transition 1881–1914 (London/Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984), 44 Google Scholar.

29 “Theatrical Gossip,” The Era, 9 May 1891; Morning Post (London), 11 May 1891; Daily News (London), 25 May 1891. Sweden had not signed the Berne Convention, which was set up in 1878 to regulate international literary copyright, granting that an author of a work was covered by the copyright laws of the country where his/her work was published—which is why Brækstad and not Leffler had the rights to True Women (see Svensson, Ann-Sofi Ljung, Jordens dotter: Selma Lagerlöf och den tyska hembygdslitteraturen (Gothenburg/Stockholm: Makadam, 2011), 65 Google Scholar.

30 Fulsås, Narve and Rem, Tore, Ibsen, , Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 192–201 Google Scholar.

31 Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 325, 333, 571–72; Anne Charlotte Leffler [as A. Ch. Edgren], Ett Qvinnoporträtt (Stockholm, 1885); see also “Annie Besant, Ett Qvinnoporträtt,” 1885; Revy i litterära och sociala frågor under medverkan av flere författare, ed. Gustaf af Geijerstam (Stockholm: Z. Hæggström, 1885), 23–44, https://books.google.se/books?id=shQzAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed 10 July 2024.

32 Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia, 38, 165, 175–6. Ibsen scholars in general disagree on Ibsen’s attitude toward the “woman question.” However, Ibsen’s reluctance to be part of ideological groups is well known. In the previously mentioned letter to Brækstad, for example, he states that he never has been the member of a political organization and never will be, although he is interested in new ideologies. Ibsen, letter to Hans Lien Brækstad, 18 August 1890.

33 Leffler, Yvonne, “Den sanna kvinnlighetens konsekvenser i Anne Charlotte Lefflers Sanna kvinnor,” in Det moderna genombrottets dramer: Fem analyser, ed. Leffler, Yvonne (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2004), 45–61 Google Scholar, at 46.

34 Gedin, David, Fältets herrar: Framväxten av en modern författarroll—Artonhundraåttitalet (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2004), 387–91Google Scholar.

35 In accordance with Toril Moi’s use of the notion, aesthetic idealism refers to a set of “post-Kantian aesthetic principles that survived romanticism” as a literary and artistic movement, which in an “impoverished, moralizing, didactic form” (compared to romanticism proper) contributed to a more or less compulsory “master discourse about literature and art” well into the twentieth century. In line with Moi’s observations, the main distinction should be made not between romanticism and realism but between ideal realism and materialist critical realisms. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, 82.

36 Holledge, Julie et al., A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 10–13 Google Scholar.

37 Leffler [as Edgren], True Women, act III, trans. Brækstad, in Our Corner 4.6 (December 1884): 360–6, at 365. The quotation in the Swedish original: “Åh gärna! Det är jag som har orätt och ni alla som ha rätt. Ärlighet, trohet och sanning—det är bara fraser—man skall vara svag, så kallas man god och kärleksfull—man skall hyckla vackra känslor, tala, framför alt tala vackra ord—.” Anne Charlotte Leffler [as A. Ch. Edgren], Sanna kvinnor: Skådespel i tre akter (Stockholm: Z. Hæggström, 1883), 88–9.

38 Leffler [as Edgren], True Women, act III, 365.

39 Leffler [as Edgren], Sanna kvinnor, 91; translation and italics mine. The quotation in the Swedish original: “Hvarför begär ni då nu att jag skall visa mig trolösare, än ni varit. Är jag inte lika nödvändig för de mina som ni?”

40 Leffler [as Edgren], True Women, act III, 366; italics mine.

41 See Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 541.

42 See Ledger, New Woman, 81, 83.

43 See Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 544, 551.

44 Archer, William, “The Drama,” New Review 7.39 (1892): 249–56Google Scholar.

45 Melucci, Nomads of the Present, 76.

46 Archer, “The Drama,” 253.

47 Ibid., 254.

48 Ibid., 253–4.

49 Ibid.

50 William and Lizzy are the anglicized adaptions in the English translation of Wilhelm and Lissi in the Swedish original.

51 Estelle, Birgitta Lindh, “Late Nineteenth-Century Radical Utopias in Theatre Reviews: Stagings and Reception of Anne Charlotte Leffler’s Sanna kvinnor ,” Nordic Theatre Studies 34.2 (2022), 103–17Google Scholar, at 113; Birgitta Lindh Estelle, “Social Imaginaries and Culture of Circulation: Sanna kvinnor in Nordic Late Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” Theatre Research International 50.1 (2025): 38–56.

52 Archer, “The Drama,” 254.

53 Melucci, Nomads of the Present, 75–6.

54 Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia, point to the continued existence of drama as a significant literary genre of national importance in Scandinavia, coupled with rapid urbanization and expanded education in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as an explanation and transcultural advantage (7–8). In addition, the absence of state censorship in Swedish and Norwegian theatre can be seen as another transcultural resource. Unlike in Britain until 1914, there was no authoritarian ban on the staging of morally provocative plays (118).

55 Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 542.

56 Ingeborg Nordin Hennel, Alfhild Agrell, rebell, humorist, berättare (Umeå: Atrium, 2014), 200.

57 See Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 541–2, 547.

58 “The Reader,” The Graphic, 18 April 1885, 394.

59 Annie Besant, “Publisher’s Corner,” Our Corner 5.1 (1885): 55.

60 Archer, “The Drama”; A. B. Walkley, “The Drama: The Goldfish,” The Speaker 6 (16 July 1892): 78–9.

61 Yvonne Leffler, “Introduction,” in Swedish Women’s Writing on Export, ed. Y. Leffler, 11–31, at 24.

62 Archer, “The Drama,” 253.

63 Ibid., 254.

64 Newey, Katherine, “Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Siècle,” in A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880–2005, ed. Luckhurst, Mary (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 35–47 Google Scholar, at 37, 40; See also Leslie Ann Dovale, “New Woman Theatre and The British Avant-Garde 1879–1925” (Ph.D. diss., Literatures in English, Graduate School–New Brunswick, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 2010), 12, https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/30041/PDF/1/play/, accessed 9 June 2024.

65 See Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia, 165.

66 “The Reader,” The Graphic, 18 April 1885, 391.

67 Johansson Lindh, “British, French, and German Reception,” 244.

68 The Pall Mall Gazette, 19 February 1889; Birmingham Daily Post, 4 March 1889; Hampshire Telegraph, 16 March 1889; Sussex Chronicles, 16 March 1889; The Athenaeum, 5 November 1892; The Evening Telegraph, 10 November 1892; Glasgow Herald, 10 November 1892.

69 Johansson Lindh, “British, French, and German Reception,” 219–20.

70 Birmingham Daily Post, 4 March 1889; Hampshire Telegraph, 16 March 1889; Sussex Chronicles, 16 March 1889.

71 Birmingham Daily Post, 4 March 1889.

72 Hélène Ohlsson, “Gudomlig, inget mindre än gudomlig!” Skådespelerskan Ellen Hartmans iscensättningar på scen och i offentlighet (Stockholm: Institutionen för kultur och estetik, Stockholms universitet, 2018), 39.

73 Hampshire Telegraph, 16 March 1889; Sussex Chronicles, 16 March 1889.

74 “Theatrical Gossip,” The Era, 5 October 1895.

75 Johansson Lindh, “British, French, and German Reception,” 221.

76 Östberg, Kjell, 1968—när allting var i rörelse: Sextiotalsradikaliseringen och de sociala rörelserna (Stockholm: Prisma, 2002), 12 Google Scholar, 15.

77 Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 300.

78 Cima, Gay Gibson, “‘To Be Public as a Genius and Private as a Woman’: The Critical Framing of Nineteenth-Century British Women Playwrights,” in Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Davis, and Donkin, Ellen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35–53 Google Scholar, at 35.

79 The woman playwright, whose play Ohne Liebe was staged in 1890 at the Freie Bühne, was Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916). Baxandall, Lee, “The Naturalist Innovation on the German Stage: The Freie Bühne and Its Influence,” Modern Drama 5 (1963): 454–76Google Scholar.

80 Besant, “Publisher’s Corner,” 55; “The Reader,” The Graphic, 18 April 1885, 394.

81 Zoltán, Imre, “Cultural Mobility, Networks, and Theatre: The Stagings of Ibsen’s Gengangere (Ghosts) in Berlin, Paris, London, Moscow, New York and Budapest between 1889 and 1908,” Nordic Theatre Studies 32.2 (2020): 6–25 Google Scholar, at 9, 17.

82 See Holledge et al., Global Doll’s House; Newey, “Ibsen in the English Theatre”; Dovale, “New Woman Theatre”; Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia.

83 Cima, “‘To Be Public as a Genius,’” 35.

84 The observation is based on twenty-five articles of varying length mentioning Alfhild Agrell, accessed via the British Newspaper Archive, 10 December 2024. Likewise, nine articles mentioning Elin Améen were also accessed.

85 Evening News, 11 May 1892; “Our Handbook,” The Referee, 15 May 1892; Nordin Hennel, Alfhild Agrell, 200.

86 See Lauritzen, Sanningens vägar, 527–41.

87 Sylvan, Maj, Anne Charlotte Leffler: En kvinna finner sin väg (Stockholm: Biblioteksförlaget, 1984), 210 Google Scholar.

88 Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia, 170.

89 Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 539.