A manor house tale

Written in 1899, Selma Lagerlof's novella A Manor House Tale is at one and the same time a complex psychological novel and a folk tale, a love story and a Gothic melodrama.

It crosses genre boundaries and locates itself in a borderland between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, darkness and light, possession and loss, life and death.

Lagerlof's two young characters, Gunnar and Ingrid, the one driven to madness by the horrific death of his goats in a blizzard, the other falling into a death-like trance as a result of the absence of familial warmth, rescue each other from their psychological underworlds and return to an everyday world that is now enhanced by the victory of goodness and love.

Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages.

Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date.

This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlof in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.