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Chapter12 k r ist i n a. r isl ey Palma Pederson (879–950) The early life of Palma Pederson¹—or Palma, her nom de plume and preferred designation in her letters—resembles the plot of one of her own novels.² Born on 8 November 879 in the coastal town of Porsgrund, Norway, Palma was the youngest of nine children and the only daughter of Per and Marie Anderson. Palma’s father was a tailor who, due to drinking, suffered severe financial losses. Such setbacks resulted in Palma and her brother, Joachim (the only surviving children), being sent away from home: Palma to a home for poor and orphaned children, her brother to work for nearby farmers. After Per Anderson was able to reestablish himself as a tailor in Ulefos,³ the family reunited. Palma attended country schools, the primary source of her formal education. One legacy of Palma’s time in the children’s home was her desire to travel to America, an idea inspired by one of her teachers, Charlotte Riis, who had spent time in the United States. Palma was struck with “America fever” and wrote of her predicament to her grandmother, Anne Korsveien, in Coon Prairie, Wisconsin . Palma describes the reply: “In the next letter from her, there came, to my great surprise, the ticket. Thus I came to America.”⁴ In 894, at the young age of fifteen, Palma immigrated to the United States (Øverland 247). During her first winter in America, she lived with her grandmother in Bloomingdale and attended public school, and that spring, Palma moved to LaCrosse to become a hired girl in the household of Kristian Pederson.⁵ After the death of Kristian Pederson’s first wife, he and Palma were married, and she became the stepmother to his three children. Palma’s domestic duties left little time for further education or intellectual 94 | kristin a. risley pursuits; in her letters, she bemoans the fact that she must devote time to household chores rather than writing. Yet she enjoyed this hobby, which first began in Norway: “Even before I left home, I tried to interpret my joys, sorrows, and other moods in verse and prose. Though my literary attempts were often lacking , it was a satisfaction for me to be busy with my writings.”⁶ A few of Palma’s early verses were submitted to the Lutheran Herald by Mrs. E. O. Vik, wife of a local pastor, and these were published, much to Palma’s “joy and surprise.”⁷ Palma’s first collection of poetry, Syrener (Lilacs),⁸ appeared in 9, but it was not until after her husband’s death in 920 that Palma devoted herself more fully to writing. In the decade that followed, most of her major works were completed: Under ansvarets svøbe (Under the Lash of Responsibility), which received the Norwegian Society’s literary prize in 923⁹; the novel Ragna in 924; and Genier (Geniuses), a sequel to her first novel, in 925. Her longest novel, Sjælekampe (Battles of the Soul), was also written during this period but was never published . In addition, Palma contributed poems, short stories, and a serialized novel to Norwegian-American periodicals.¹⁰ Palma’s remarkable story is typical of many immigrant and ethnic writers in the early twentieth century who—despite formidable economic, social, personal, and artistic hardships—wrote American literature in languages other than English. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States was home to a rich assortment of ethnic print cultures that produced books and periodicals for their respective immigrant groups. Palma participated in the active literary scene of Vesterheimen (literally, “the western home”), a term used by Norwegian Americans to refer to their distinct ethnic, linguistic, and geographic “home” in the United States.¹¹ The nucleus of this ethnic enclave was the Upper Midwest, the primary area of settlement for Norwegian immigrants. Palma wrote and published the majority of her literary works in the early decades of the twentieth century, just as Norwegian-American literature was experiencing its golden age. While Palma’s letters reveal challenges faced by many ethnic and regional writers, they provide special insights into her situation as a woman writer in Vesterheimen,apositionoffrequent marginalizationand“gender-imposedisolation from the male fellowship of other writers” (Øverland 28).¹² Shaped by publishers , editors, critics, scholars, and clergy, the literary milieu of Vesterheimen was overwhelmingly male. Moreover, the Norwegian-American literati formed a relatively small, select group; many of those involved knew each other well, which caused tension when it came...

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