Kvinnan, kärleken och Lord Byrons förbannelse

Abstract

The traditional image of the woman who loves is the woman who waits. Lord Byron's famous words about love as a woman's whole existence, still today works as a curse for all women who writes about love in different genres. How are you going to write about wliat you yourself are? In this artide the relation between gender, love and authorship is discussed from several perspectives. The male 19th century writer Stendhal illustrates an illusory "objective" approach on the subject of love, which is still Iteld as an ideal. A revisory female approach is here represented by the modernist novels House of Incest (1936) by Anais Nin and Blodförmörkelse (1951) by Rut Hillarp. In these novels, which both can be labelled female novels of passion, love and women's love-waiting is explored in a radical new mode. Waiting becomes an aesthetics, an art of survival in life as well as in literature.