Bear Woman (Björnkvinnan)

In 1541, a young woman named Marguerite de La Rocque accompanies her male guardian on one of the first French colonial expeditions to the New World. After a sexual scandal aboard the ship, she is punished & abandoned on an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, where she faces off against wild animals & the elements, incredibly surviving against all odds. Centuries later, a contemporary author comes across the legend of the Bear Woman & becomes obsessed.

Approaching Marguerite the only way she knows how – by writing – the author is made acutely aware of her own writing process: both as a shield against & as a way of understanding the world she lives in. She finds herself the mother of three young children, enduring a harsh winter & an even colder cultural climate. Gradually, the author’s life becomes intertwined with Marguerite’s, a literary figure as much as a figment of her own imagination. The more the author digs through historical archives, the more uncertain she becomes of who Marguerite really was, & of her own motivations for writing about her.

Penned in an essayistic style in the vein of Marguerite Duras, The Bear Woman is a meditation on womanhood & on the act of writing as much as it is a story of survival – Marguerite’s & the author’s. In her characteristic sparsely elegant prose, leading Scandinavian writer & feminist Karolina Ramqvist tackles questions of what it is to be a woman who writes, as well as what a story is & who has the right to tell it. 

With shared themes that transcend the centuries that divide two seemingly very different lives, The Bear Woman offers insight into the solitary nature of the writing life, & the currency of being a woman then & now.

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Karolina Ramqvist (1976) is one of the most influential writers & feminists of her generation in Sweden. Her 2012 generational coming-of-age-novel The Beginning rocketed into instant cult status