Dikken Zwilgmeyer: The Thirteen-Year-Old Author Who Was Thirty-Seven

In the autumn of 1890 a Norwegian newspaper announced that a thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a town magistrate in Bergen, had written a book. The title page of Vi børn (We Children) said it was by "Inger Johanne, 13 Aar gammel." The real author was thirty-seven, lived in Kristiania, and was called Dikken Zwilgmeyer.

Barbara Hendrikke Wind Daae Zwilgmeyer (1853–1913) was born in Trondheim. When she was eight, her father became town magistrate (byfogd) in Risør, and the family moved to the little coastal town on the Skagerrak. That detail gave her away. Within a year the papers had worked out that several of the stories were set in Risør, and Aftenposten guessed "Frøken Zwilgmeyer," the late magistrate's daughter. The mask was made from her own face: Inger Johanne is a magistrate's daughter in a coastal town, and so was she.

Her publisher, Fr. Nygaard in Bergen, kept the Inger Johanne name on the books until 1895, when Barndom (Childhood) finally carried her real name. The same month she published Som kvinder er, six stories about unmarried women of the official class, her first book for adults. A year later, a reviewer could still call her "the hitherto somewhat unknown authoress." All of Norway knew Inger Johanne. Hardly anyone knew Dikken Zwilgmeyer.

The Inger Johanne books are remembered as cheerful mischief, and much of them is. But the stories the best readers picked out are something else. "Eiebakke," in We Children, opens with a confession: "For I was wicked, horribly wicked to him, and now I regret it so unspeakably." Eiebakke is a shy teacher whom the class torments, and Inger Johanne laughs loudest. Then she meets his poor mother, who thanks her, because her son has told her the pupils are so kind. A few months later he is dead. The story ends without comfort: "And just think, now I can never even ask him to forgive me."

The first serious reviewer, in Framgang in December 1890, singled out exactly that story. Twenty-three years later, Sigrid Undset wrote a memorial essay after Zwilgmeyer's death (later collected in Etapper, 1929) and chose the same one, together with "Magrete Kind" from Childhood, a story about a plain, poor girl the other children shut out. Undset called these small stories among the best ever written in Norwegian about children.

English-speaking readers never got them. Emilie Poulsson's American translations, Johnny Blossom (1912), What Happened to Inger Johanne (1919) and Inger Johanne's Lively Doings (1926), took the pigs, the dancing school and the interrupted 17 May parade, and left out both "Eiebakke" and "Magrete Kind." The cheerful stories travelled. The painful ones stayed home.

Zwilgmeyer died in Kongsberg on 28 February 1913. Today a statue of Inger Johanne stands outside the cultural centre in Risør. It is time the woman behind her got read as well.

Ravn has published fourteen of Zwilgmeyer's books in modernised Bokmål, with the historical text kept as a separate layer. Start with We Children and Childhood. The full essay, with the 1890s reviews and Undset's reading, is here: Dikken Zwilgmeyer: Inger Johanne, 13 år gammel, og damen bak. More books on her author page.