America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer

In 1849, the famous Swedish novelist and reformer Fredrika Bremer arrived in America bearing the weight of transatlantic fame. Over the next two years, she traversed a nation hurtling toward its great reckoning, recording her observations in letters that reveal a sharp, sympathetic, and sometimes unflinching foreign eye. She met the era's most celebrated writers, from Emerson to Hawthorne; she walked through Shaker villages and Quaker meetinghouses; she conversed with senators in Washington and witnessed the brutal reality of slavery in the South. She toured Scandinavian settlements on the frontier, inspected prisons, and everywhere turned her careful attention to the legal bondage and social subjugation of American women. These letters capture a country in dramatic transition, seen through the perspective of a woman who had already shaken the foundations of Swedish society with her novels. Bremer brings curiosity, reformist passion, and genuine wonder to her accounts of a democracy still working out its contradictions.