We Women and Our Authors

Laura Marholm

Laura Katharina Marholm (1854–1928) was a Baltic-German writer of literary criticism, biographies about women, and novels. The main characters in her novels were women who felt fulfilled in marriage. Marholm was a New Woman feminist that wrote about feminist issues. Due to some of her beliefs, some other feminists did not consider Marholm to be among them. She believed that literature could be used to help gender relations. Some of Marholm's works were part of "feminist literary criticism" known as gynocriticism, 70 years before the term was coined, with much of that work being focused on Nordic women authors.