Nini roll anchor

Nini Roll anchor, painted by Erik Werenskiold

Nini Roll Anker (born May 3, 1873 in Molde , † May 20, 1942 in Asker ; actually Nicoline Magdalene Anker, née Roll ) was a Norwegian writer. She also published under the pseudonyms Kåre P. and Jo Nein and is counted among the major authors of neuralism ( nyrealisme ) in Norway.

Life

Childhood and youth

Anker was the daughter of Ferdinand Roll and his second wife Sophie Nicoline Knudtzon . Ferdinand Roll, a lawyer and later Minister of Justice, was a senior civil servant and politician in the western Norwegian town of Molde at the time. He was a city ​​councilor and mayor in 1875, 1876 and 1887. For a while he was also a member of the Storting .

Anker's mother, Sophie Nicoline Knudtzon, also came from an influential family. Knudtzon's father the doctor Christian Frederik Knudtzon , her grandfather the businessman Nicolai Heinrich Knudtzon .

Presumably at the instigation of her mother, Anker received an unusually good education for civil servants' daughters. In Molde she first attended the girls' school, but then switched to the Latin school in 1886 when girls were admitted there for the first time.

On October 22, 1887, Ferdinand Roll was appointed to Norges Høyesterett , the Supreme Court of Norway. The family therefore moved to Kristiania , where Anker graduated from a girls' school in 1889.

First marriage and early works

In 1892 she married Peter Martin Anker , who came from a respected and powerful family. The couple first moved to the Iddefjord and later settled near Fredrikshald , where Peter Anker's family owned an estate. During this marriage, she worked to improve the living and working conditions of the employees who depend on the estate and their families. In 1902 she joined the newly founded Fredrikshalder women's association , in which her sister-in-law was also involved, as one of the first members. She also began to vote for the Liberals , which did not please those around the Anker family. Her first literary publications also fell during the time of her marriage to Peter Anker: She made her debut in 1898 with the novel I blind , which she published under the pseudonym Jo Nein . In 1906 her second book was published, the collection of short stories Lill-Anna og de andre , in which she addressed the situation of the workers who worked for the Anker family. Lill-Anna og de andre is considered to be one of the first works in Norwegian literature to deal with working-class women. Her husband was little taken with the book, and the marriage, which was already burdened by different political and philosophical views, was finally divorced in 1907. Anker then moved back to her hometown of Molde.

Breakthrough with Benedicte Stendal

Anker had her breakthrough as a writer in 1909 with the novel Benedicte Stendal , written in diary form , about a young woman who is under the influence of her civil servant family. The heroine in the title is a typical example of the main female characters in Anker's works. One of her most important works is the novel Det svake kjøn , published in 1915 , in which she criticizes the positions of the Christian church towards women. The main character Veronica marries a strictly religious man and only realizes shortly before she dies after a stillbirth that he does not love her. The oppression of women discussed in this novel is an important theme in other of Anker's novels.

Second marriage, Kåre P. novels and further successes

In January 1910, Nini Roll Anker married the cousin of her first husband, the wealthy shipyard owner and engineer Johan August Anker , and moved to live with him in Asker .

In 1916, Anker became Vice President of the Norwegian Writers' Union . During the First World War , she stayed temporarily with her sister in Paris . After she and her husband returned to Norway with Fridtjof Nansen in 1919 , the staunch pacifist Anker wrote the anti-war play Kirken . The play was premiered at the National Theater in 1921 and was a great success.

Between 1927 and 1930, Anker published a total of three novels under the pseudonym Kåre P., which were written from the perspective of a young man. Critics suspected that the author of the works was a young, male and as yet unknown writer, whom they praised as a promising talent.

In 1935 the novel Den som henger i en tråd (Those hanging by a thread) was published, in which she describes the difficult life of seamstresses in a garment factory. This novel, sometimes referred to as her best known, established Anker's reputation as a working class writer, even if she is not always taken seriously as such due to her bourgeois background.

From 1938 onwards, Anker took action against the impending war . She wrote political newspapers for Norwegian newspapers and promoted peace together with international fellow writers. Also in 1938 she began work on her last novel, Kvinnen og den svarte fuglen , in which, as in the play Kirken, which was written after the First World War, she takes a stand against the war. She finished the novel in 1942, shortly before her death. Because of the war, however, like Minenn Sigrid Undset , Anker's biography of her friend Sigrid Undset could only be published posthumously.

reception

Although Anker's work was seldom praised and often hardly noticed by literary critics, she was a successful author. She influenced younger writers such as Sigurd Hoel , Arnulf Øverland and Helge Krog as a link to the older generation, which included Georg Brandes and Gunnar Heiberg , who also valued Anker.

Although she was close to the labor movement in her views, Anker was partially perceived as a bourgeois writer. As a result, she was an outsider both there and in the upper class. In the radical feminist movement, Anker was largely alone with her views - she did not assume gender equality, but rather that women are predestined for higher political and social positions precisely because of innate differences. For this she was criticized within the feminist movement.

literature

• Tordis Ørjasæter and Jo Ørjasæter: Nini Roll anchor: en kvinne i tiden . ( Aschehoug , 2000). ISBN 82-03-26066-7 - Author's biography (Norwegian).
• Torild Homstad: Nini Roll Anker in Tanya Thresher (Ed.): Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 297: Twentieth-Century Norwegian Writers . Gale, Detroit, et al. 2004.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ferdinand Roll in the Norsk biografisk leksikon
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Nini Roll anchor in the Norsk biografisk leksikon
3. ^ Roll, Ferdinand Nicolai in Tarrak Lindstøl (ed.): Stortinget og Statsraadet . Steenske Bogtrykkeri, Kristiania 1914-1915
4. ↑ Knudtzon, Christian Frederik in Frantz Casper Kiær: Norges Læger i det nittende Aarhundrede (1800-1886) . Cammermeyer, Christiania 1888/1890
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Homstad, p. 4
6. ^ Roll, Ferdinand Nicolai in Jens Braage Halvordsen: Norsk Forfatter-Lexicon, 1814-1880 . Norske Forlagsforening, Oslo 1885-1906
7. ^ ^{A b} Nini Roll anchor in Alf G. Andersen and Hans-Erik Hansen: 500 som preget Norge . Damm / Millenium, Oslo 1999
8. ↑ ^{a b c d} Homstad, p. 5
9. ↑ ^{a b} Nini Roll anchor in the Norske Leksikon store
10. ↑ Horst Bien: Anker, Nini in ders. (Ed.): Meyers Taschenlexikon Nordeuropean Literaturen , Leipzig 1978
11. ↑ ^{a b} Homstad, p. 6
12. ^ Anker, Nini Roll in Willy Dahl: Nytt Norsk Forfatterleksikon , 1971
13. ↑ Homstad, p. 7f
14. ↑ Homstad, p. 8
15. ↑ ^{a b} Homstad, p. 10
16. ↑ ^{a b} Homstad, p. 9