reason of the noble idealism, the wealth of imagination, the
soulful quality of style, which characterize her works." Five years
later, in 1914, that august body elected Doctor Lagerlöf into their
fellowship, and she is thus the only woman among those eighteen
"immortals."

What is the secret of the power that has made Miss Lagerlöf an
author acknowledged not alone as a classic in the schools but also
as the most popular and generally beloved writer in Scandinavia?
She entered Swedish literature at a period when the cold gray star
of realism was in the ascendant, when the trenchant pen of
Strindberg had swept away the cobwebs of unreality, and people were
accustomed to plays and novels almost brutal in their frankness.
Wrapped in the mantle of a latter-day romanticism, her soul filled
with idealism, on the one hand she transformed the crisp
actualities of human experience by throwing about them the glamour
of the unknown, and on the other hand gave to the unreal--to folk
tale and fairy lore and local superstition--the effectiveness of
convincing fact. "Selma Lagerlöf," says the Swedish composer,
Hugo Alfvén, "is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral ...
afterward one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or
reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground." The average
mind, whether Swedish or Anglo-Saxon, soon wearies of heartless
preciseness in literature and welcomes an idealism as wholesome as
that of Miss Lagerlöf. Furthermore, the Swedish authoress attracts
her readers by a diction unique unto herself, as singular as the
English sentences of Charles Lamb. Her style may be described as
prose rhapsody held in restraint, at times passionately breaking
its bonds.