The Story of Gösta Berling

The Story of Gösta Berling, first published in Swedish in 1891, is Selma Lagerlöf's debut novel. Set in the early nineteenth-century landscape of Värmland, it unfolds as a chain of legends, romances, comic episodes, and disasters.

Gösta is a gifted and handsome minister destroyed by drink and expelled from his parish. The formidable Major's wife saves him from despair and gives him shelter at Ekeby, where he joins twelve pensioners and adventurers known as the Cavaliers.

On Christmas Eve the Cavaliers enter a reckless bargain that gives them control of Ekeby for a year and drives their benefactor into exile. Feasts, love affairs, pride, and neglect bring consequences across the district, while the sinister Sintram seems to move between ordinary malice and the supernatural.

Gösta's charm links the many stories, but the novel gradually asks what must follow charm: work, responsibility, and atonement. His bond with Countess Elizabeth becomes part of a larger movement from destructive freedom toward community and renewal.

"At last the minister stood in the pulpit. The heads of the congregation were lifted. Well, there he finally was. There would be no default this Sunday, as on the last and on many other Sundays before. The minister was young, tall, slender, and strikingly handsome."

This edition uses the English translation by Pauline Bancroft Flach.