"Grasping The Nettle" .: "Anna's Year in Paris 1879-1880" - Paperback

by Birgitta Fletcher-Tomenius (Author)

It was late on a cold and dark November evening in 1879 when the steam train roared into Paris. The door was flung open and Anna was overwhelmed by the din of shouting porters and coachmen, from the motley scene of people of all types and ages hurrying in all directions but most of all, by the beauty of the language which even the roughest of the porters spoke. The Count, showing fatherly concern for her, helped her to descend and said quietly, almost to himself: "I wonder how you would have managed here on your own." Anna, a Swedish twenty-two year old innocent from a remote country manor, felt both exhilaration at the realisation of her most longed for dream and also great anxiety whether she would be able to cope. Some months and many experiences later, she had very different concerns. Why should not a young man and a young woman be able to show each other trust and friendship without speaking about love? She now hated what she had previously taken for granted, what she now regarded as "all these stilted, unnatural habits, which prevent us getting to know young men properly in private..... But where is the limit to our freedom and when do we sin?"

Author Biography

Anna was my maternal grandmother's mother who was born in Sweden in 1857. My great aunt and God Mother inherited a great number of black notebooks on Anna's death in 1958. Most were summarised into two, brief books in Swedish by my mother in 1980. I have translated and summarised the diaries relating to Anna's stay in Paris during the year of 1879-1880 because they were only touched on briefly in my mother's books and seem relevant even today for modern people of all ages who may have had similar experiences when growing up, which may also have had lifetime significance for them.