Mathilda Malling
Ingrid Mathilda Kruse Malling, better known by her early pen name Stella Kleve, was a Swedish novelist known for her portrayals of women's sensuality.
Biography
Early life
Malling was born on her family's farm in North Mellby Parish, Kristianstad County, Sweden in 1864. Daughter of Danish estate owner Frans Oskar Kruse and Anna Maria Mathilda Borgström, she graduated from Lyceum for Girls in Stockholm in 1883, then studied at Lund University and in Switzerland in 1884, and in Copenhagen from 1885 to 1886.Controversial early works
Malling debuted in 1885 with the novel Berta Funcke, followed in 1888 by the novel Alice Brandt, both published under the pseudonym Stella Kleve. In 1886, she published the novel Pyrrhussegrar in the progressive feminist publication by Alma Åkermark. Her contemporaries took note of her sensually colored depictions of young women, but posterity now considers her decadent late-naturalistic depiction of women as the female counterpart of the male breakthrough novels of this time. She had early contact with Ola Hansson who frequently corresponded with her and also courted and proposed to her. Hansson portrayed her, after a difficult break-up, in Tidens kvinnor as "Gallblomma". Emil Kléen and, young poets and students, wanted to include her in a Scanian "decadent calendar" in the late 1880s, but failed to persuade her. Anti-Semitism and misogyny in the decadent literary style have been the source of much scholarship.Fictionalized portrayal of Molly Brant
Detracting from presumed feminism, Malling's novel, Daybreak, published in 1906 by a respected "magazine of the world's best fiction," depicts entirely real characters and settings, by name, thus promoting the vilification of an early American feminist leader of native people. Today, the reader is impressed by its sensational, even slanderous, quality. The very real Mary Brant, and her culture, might well have considered such 'fictions' to be but a form of highly influential propaganda, presented with a thin veneer of fiction, and meant to degrade Brant, who was an influential Mohawk and the consort of Sir William Johnson.A breakthrough female herself, perhaps insight into Malling's motivation, in scandalizing Brant through fiction, is somewhat explained in the University of Illinois's and Northwestern University's 1918 Scandinavian Studies and Notes: While "a popular writer of considerable talent... it is Mathilda Malling's pride to think that descendants of her own race did something to establish American freedom and they like so many others were resolved not to yield an inch from what they considered right."