Harriet Löwenhjelm (1887–1918)

Harriet Löwenhjelm, the daughter of an aristocratic Swedish family, grew up in a privileged environment in Stockholm and traveled in Europe and Asia. She began writing poetry as a child. Her cousin Marianne Mörner, a docent in French at Lund University, accompanied her on a trip to Paris and helped introduce her poetry and etchings into Sweden artistic circles in the 1920s after Harriet's tragic early death in a sanatorium from tuberculosis. Harriet studied at a teachers college as well as at the Academy of Art in Stockholm. She joined a group of women wood engravers working at the studio of Harriet Sundström, a prominent printmaker and woodcut artist. Her poems were originally meant to be published as a complement to her drawings and etchings. In 1913, she made a lithograph print of her work Konsten att älska och dess följder (The Art of Loving and Its Consequences) after the manuscript had been turned down by several publishers. She gave the manuscript for her first selection of poems to a close friend, Elsa Björkman, who arranged for them to be published posthumously in 1919. Harriet Löwenhjelm's unpublished work consist of 22 diaries with vignettes, etchings, drawings, letters, and poems. Her poem "Beatrice-Aurore" was set to music by Hjalmar Casserman.