Cora Sandel (1880–1974)
Author of Alberta and Jacob
About the Author
Sandel's best-known work is an autobiographical trilogy---Alberta and Jacob (1926), Alberta and Freedom (1931), and Alberta Alone (1939), which describes with insight and honesty the coming to maturity of a small-town Norwegian girl. Trained as a painter, Sandel has an eye for telling detail. She show more is also an attentive student of human nature. Sandel's short stories often explore with great sympathy the lives of society's outcasts and underdogs. She is a masterful prose stylist of marvelous delicacy whose work rarely fails to move. Her insight into the psyches of women and artists is especially acute and justly praised. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
(nor) Cora Sandel is a pseudonym for Sara Cecilia Gørvell Fabricius
Series
Works by Cora Sandel
Figurer på mörk botten 6 copies
En blå sofa og andre noveller 4 copies
Mange takk doktor 3 copies
Carmen och Maja och andra noveller 2 copies
Dyr jeg har kjent 1 copy
The Days We Were Alive 1 copy
Associated Works
Jo's Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit, and Real Life (1997) — Contributor — 47 copies
Fotspår : noveller ur Sveriges radio P1:s serie Författarskap på fötter (2003) — Contributor — 5 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Fabricius, Sara Cecilie Margareta Görvell
Fabricius, Sara
Fabricius, Sara Cecilie Margareta Gjorwell - Birthdate
- 1880-12-20
- Date of death
- 1974-04-03
- Burial location
- Uppsala, Sweden
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Norway
- Birthplace
- Oslo, Norway
- Place of death
- Uppsala, Sweden
- Places of residence
- Kristiania, Norway
Paris, France
Tromsø, Norway - Occupations
- painter
writer
novelist - Relationships
- Jönsson, Anders (ex-husband)
- Awards and honors
- Gyldendals legat (1937)
Royal Norwegian Order of St Olav (1957) - Short biography
- Sara Fabricius was born in Kristiana (now Oslo), Norway and the family moved to Tromsø when she was 12. She started painting as a teenager and went to Paris, where she married the Swedish sculptor Anders Jönsson. In 1921, the couple moved to Sweden. Sara and her husband divorced and she won custody of their son. She was 46 years old when her debut novel, Alberte and Jakob, was published under the pen name Cora Sandel. It was the first volume of what was to become the largely autobiographical Alberta Trilogy.
- Disambiguation notice
- Cora Sandel is a pseudonym for Sara Cecilia Gørvell Fabricius
Members
Reviews
Alberta and Freedom by Cora Sandel
This second book of the trilogy places Alberta in Paris before the first world war. She hangs out with the artistic crowd around Montparnasse, but woe to Alberta, who is"just a woman." She aspires to being a writer, and indeed has sold some articles on human interest to a magazine. While men artists around her achieve some success, she becomes more and more poor, living in a succession of the cheapest hotel rooms she can find, with bedbugs and mice and the disgusting human smells accumulating under her attic roof. Patriarchal society in the early part of the 20th century being the death knell that it is for the kind of freedom that Alberta seeks, she ends up as so many women before and after her, who have a picture they hold dear in their hearts, of an important and meaningful life.… (more)
When you're young and you're frustrated by your emotions, your inability to make the world work the way you think it should, life can seem unbearably unjust. You may even think of taking your life to end all this hurting, and even succeed at it, as did my own poor sister. But you may get a glimpse of the drabber, infinitely more hopeless lives of older, saddened and resigned people who despite all that, go "back to it" day after day, step by step, until it's ended, and realize that there it is, life, to be met full on and made the best of. That's what Alberta's life is, in the stiflingly patriarchal small-town society in which she exists in northern Norway. Insightful and moving.… (more)
Some lovely short stories, many following the themes in her "Alberta and Jacob" trilogy- wartime, impoverished artists in France, the difficulties of marriage (these were quite brilliant and very identifiable!),
Lovely writing.
Lovely writing.
Although this is a novel, it feels more like a play. In two "Scenes" the author is transported to a cafe in a small town in N Norway, in the (1920s?)
Owner Mrs Krane must manage while her husband's away, assisted by a couple of waitresses. And as a "situation" begins to develop between her "regulars", she and the staff listen in with increasing horror.....
Separated dressmaker, Katinks Stordal, seems to have abandoned her work (and her two teens) to the demon drink....the local ladies are becoming frantic for their unfinished ballgowns...and she falls in with a disreputable, lonely harbour hand...in Mrs Krane's parlour!
Meanwhile her ex husband drops in...and various others who have more linking them together than we at first dreamed.
You feel a kind of Greek chorusof sententious old gossips is looking on and passing comment throughout.
Put me much in mind of an Ibsen play- a (just slightly) implausible plotline, but strong on characters and action.… (more)
Owner Mrs Krane must manage while her husband's away, assisted by a couple of waitresses. And as a "situation" begins to develop between her "regulars", she and the staff listen in with increasing horror.....
Separated dressmaker, Katinks Stordal, seems to have abandoned her work (and her two teens) to the demon drink....the local ladies are becoming frantic for their unfinished ballgowns...and she falls in with a disreputable, lonely harbour hand...in Mrs Krane's parlour!
Meanwhile her ex husband drops in...and various others who have more linking them together than we at first dreamed.
You feel a kind of Greek chorusof sententious old gossips is looking on and passing comment throughout.
Put me much in mind of an Ibsen play- a (just slightly) implausible plotline, but strong on characters and action.… (more)
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Statistics
- Works
- 21
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 887
- Popularity
- #28,887
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 19
- ISBNs
- 98
- Languages
- 9
- Favorited
- 3