Book launch: Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman

The Modern Humanities Research Association is delighted to announce the publication of volume 11 in our Jewelled Tortoise series: Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman by L. Onerva, translated by Eva Buchwald with an introduction and notes by Viola Parente-Čapková.

L. Onerva (the pen name of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882-1972) was one of the most versatile literary figures of her generation, and her novel Mirdja is among the most important works of Nordic fin-de-siècle literature. It recounts the life of its free-spirited protagonist from adolescence to old age as she navigates the gendered world around her, testing the boundaries of her sexuality and railing against conventionality. Onerva’s candid, subversive depiction of society’s norms and traditions creates a vivid backdrop to her heroine’s defiant quest for self-determination.

Mirdja sharply divided the opinions of the contemporary reading public, winning the National Prize for Literature while being widely condemned for immorality. An example of early Modernist writing, described as having Decadent and Nietzschean tendencies, the novel has since been re-evaluated in light of feminist criticism and new trends in scholarship on fin-de-siècle culture and New Woman fiction. Just as her protagonist rebels against the constraints of bourgeois norms, so Onerva challenged the conventions of prose to create an experimental, vividly individualistic form of expression. This fully annotated translation brings this remarkable work of Decadent literature to an English readership for the first time.

Please join us for this dicsussion with Eva Buchwald and Viola Parente-Čapková to hear more about L. Onerva's work. This event will be moderated by Riitta Valijärvi, UCL SSEES.

Speakers:

Eva Buchwald studied at SSEES, London University, where she obtained her PhD in Finnish and Russian literature in 1990. She subsequently moved to Finland and worked as a freelance translator alongside her long-term career as Dramaturg for the Finnish National Theatre. She was appointed Head of Dramaturgy in 2012 and held the post until her retirement in 2025. She is currently working on a stage adaptation of Mirdja, to open in 2026.

Viola Parente-Čapková is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. Her major research interests are fin de siècle women’s writing with focus on L. Onerva, on which she has published widely, as well as literary history and its theory, gender studies, philology, and digital literary studies. Her publications include “Decadent New Woman (Un)Bound: Mimetic Strategies in L. Onerva’s Mirdja (University of Turku, 2014), Nordic Literature of Decadence (co-edited, Routledge, 2020) and Redrawing Europe’s Literary Map: Transnational Circulations of Women’s Writing 1850–1920 (Brill, upcoming).

Image credit: After breakfast by Elin Danielson-Gambogi, 1890