This volume explores the production of loss in nationalist discourses during the long nineteenth century in the Baltic Sea region – how the notion of loss was charged with emotions in political writings, lectures, novels, paintings, letters and diaries.

"This book is a companion volume to Biographical books, 1950-1980, completing a comprehensive one hundred and five year bibliography of biographical and autobiographical works published or distributed in the United States"--Preface.

Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) reached out to the world beyond her native Sweden. Her promotion of women’s emancipation was celebrated and pursued by Sophie Adlersparre (1823–1895), Rosalie Olivecrona (1823–1898), and Alma Åkermark (1853–1933). From dreams to projects involving collaboration with Britain, France, and Germany, in translation, literature, and periodical editing, this book unearths exciting transnational connections that contributed to the awakening of the Nordic feminist movement. Shedding light on the circulation of liberal ideas, Marxist theory, and the Nordic debate, the three chapters of the book focus on cultural variation, constructive conflicts, mutual (mis)understandings, and class issues.

Women Telling Nations highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, we examine how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, we deal with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth we analyse how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country’s borders. Women Telling Nations underlines the quantitative importance of the circulation of these women’s writings and demonstrates the extent as well as the impact of the international cross-fertilisation of nations, especially by and for women: focusing on routes rather than roots.