Lindhardt og Ringhof. Et forlagseventyr

I gave them proved so popular. They hadn’t known there
was a woman’s market out there. These days, when women
rule the publishing world it’s hard to remember how things
once were, or the battle women had to be taken seriously
as writers, artists, playwrights. But the market was obviously
there – and so I was labelled a feminist writer. It was not
how I had seen myself – I painted a portrait of the world as
I saw it, that was all – but I wasn’t going to deny it.
And once Lindhardt and Ringhof took me on, other
countries followed suit. First Norway, then Sweden, then
Germany, Holland, the Netherlands – in the countries with
a Lutheran tradition – where people were responsible for
their own conscien ce, I like to think. The catholic countries
followed later – now they’re creeping into Eastern Europe,
Russia.
It was a marketing ploy fairly shocking to other more traditional
publishers, as indeed the books to critics – how
could anyone who wrote in the present tense actually call
them selves a writer? (Everyone does it nowadays – too
many for my taste – but then it was new, I promise you.) But
the queues at the book shop signings for the new women’s
literature were long and impressive: women couldn’t get
enough of the new voices, new ways of writing methods,
novels which took female lives as worthy of consideration
– which dealt with something other than women as stereotypes
– the mother, Madonna, whore syndrome which typified
the old male European tradition.
In those bookshops signings Otto would stand by, forbidding
me to sign the English editions which the booksellers
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