Herkkä, hellä, hehkuvainen by Minna Maijala

Social equity was another of Canth’s topics. Minna Rytisalo decided to write Rouva C (“Mrs C”) after she read Minna Maijala’s biography of Minna Canth, Herkkä, hellä, hehkuvainen (“Sensitive, Gentle, Radiant”). Rytisalo mentions Tove Jansson as “another Finnish writer who always knew the way she wanted to create art.” A painter, illustrator and writer, Jansson is most famous for inventing the Moomintrolls but also wrote novels and short stories for adults. She believed in doing your own thing and knowing in your heart that it is the right thing to do, even when the world says it’s not.” “The attitude had is something we can all learn from. “You can see traces of her thinking in the works of Saara Turunen, a writer who…asks audiences to consider…why we gender people,” Rytisalo says.

She adds, “In a way, she was Finland’s first feminist.”Ĭanth’s legacy has inspired generations of feminist writing in Finland. Rytisalo tells me that the Me Too movement is prompting “exactly the kinds of conversations that Minna Canth would have wanted us to have.” “Establishing a right doesn’t guarantee forever.” “Rights are never written in stone,” Rytisalo says. “She believed that girls should have the right to an education…to learn about things like science, nature and the economy,” says Rytisalo, who teaches Finnish language and literature at the upper secondary (high school) level.Īlthough Finland has taken huge steps towards achieving gender equality since Canth’s time, her writing remains relevant. “In many ways was ahead of her time,” says Minna Rytisalo, author of Rouva C (“Mrs C,” published by Gummerus in 2018), a fictionalised account of Canth’s marriage to her former teacher, Johan Ferdinand Canth (1835–79).

Author and teacher Minna Rytisalo cautions that “establishing a right doesn’t guarantee it forever,” and says that we can all learn from Minna Canth’s attitude.

Herkkä, hellä, hehkuvainen by Minna Maijala