The Treasure is an opposite fairy tale, presenting Prince Charming
as he really is: an orphan girl is cleaning fish and foreseeing
her life of poverty; a man well-dressed in seductive splendor woos
her and offers her ... forever after. There is only one catch: she
must betray her sister.

Although Selma Lagerlof won the Nobel Prize for literature in
1909, her name is known in this country--if at all--as author of a
children's book only. All her other works, including novels and
feminist essays, have been unavailable in English for almost fifty
years.

In 1911, she made a speech entitled "Home and State" to the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress. She argued, first,
that the Home was the creation of woman and the place where the
values of women were nourished and protected. The Home was a
community where "punishment is not for the sake of revenge, but
for training and education," where "there is a use for all
talents, but [she] who is without can make [her] self as much
loved as the cleverest." It was the "storehouse for the songs and
legends of our fore-fathers," and, she said, "there is nothing
more mobile, more merciful amongst the creations of [humankind]."
Although not all homes are good, good and happy homes do sometimes
exist. Men by themselves, on the other hand, were responsible for
creating the State which "continually gives cause for discontent
and bitterness." There has never been a State which could satisfy
all its members, which did not ask to be reformed from its very