Greta Beckius och den omöjliga studentskeromanen

Abstract

Until the beginning of the 20th century Swedish nniversity novels were written by men. It took almost förty years from 1873 when women were accepted at the universities before female students were able to use their own experience and depict university life in a realistic way. In 1915 a young journalist and academic named Ellen Landquist published her first and only novel called Suzanne, which was an account of female students' lives in Uppsala around 1910. From that day the number of female writers dealing with university life in their novels gradually increased. A comparative reading of a couple of university novels, published between 1904 and 1943 by female and male writers, is the subject of my doctoral thesis. In this article I take a closer look at women writers dealing with Swedish university life at the beginning of the century. I am focusing on Marit Grene, an unpublished and partly destroyed novel, written by a young Uppsala student named Greta Beckius (1886-1912). After Beckius' suicide the manuscript was taken care of by her friends and relatives and it was regarded as shocking and immoral. It therefore remained unpublished causing a great deal of controversy among the people involved. Finally Beckius' sister partly destroyed the manuscript in order to protect the author's memory. In order to point out the similarities and the differences between Beckius' manuscript and those written by the other women writers, I focus on main topics, such as love, moral, sexuality and equality between sexes. These topics are characteristic of all university novels written by female authors, and they also distinguish them from those male writers who depicted university life at that time. For the women writers, discussing female sexuality and the problem of responsibility in love and relationsships was often the primary project. However, among the female writers, Greta Beckius is the most outspoken when it comes to discussing a young woman's sexual initiation. Beckius' novel shows a female academic who struggles against the double standard of morality represented by the patriarchal society. Beckius is very outspoken about intercourse and sexual abuse at a time when other female writers chose to let their public read between the lines. My conjecture is that the book, could never have been published as early as 1912 even if Beckius had lived to revise and finish her manuscript.