Fredrika Bremer was a nineteenth-century writing sensation, her bestselling novels and travel books instantly translated into a range of other European languages. This early work shows she was never afraid to abandon the prevailing conventions of insipid romantic fiction to explore the social and moral problems facing women. This novel also has one of the most interesting narrators one could wish to meet: the plain-speaking but perceptive housekeeper Beata Hvardagslag, called back to the family to cook up a solution to their problems, Metaphors of kitchen and household abound in her astonishingly modern, metacritical approach to storytelling.

Mirjam Tuominen was a major poet and short story writer, as well as a distinguished essayist, translator and artist. Her work progressed through traditional prose, modernist poetry and abstract painting to Roman Catholic mysticism. She is one of the trio of great Nordic women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Karin Boye – all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books.

Her stories are often about love’s intensity, its eroticism and tenderness, about jealousy and struggles for power between men and women. They are acute in their depiction of small town life in Finland in the 1940s, and in capturing her sense of dread at the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies during the War. Everything she wrote afterwards was scarred by the horror of the Holocaust, and in particular by one news story of a German soldier who threw a Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried when the soldier was whipping his mother. Tuominen had a frightening, self-destructive ability to react directly to the suffering of others, and much of her poetry can be traced back to her anguished response to this one incident. Her poems are obsessive in confronting guilt, vulnerability and power, in their searching for absolute truth in a world she saw as split between victims and tormentors.

Tuominen was drawn to writers who were vulnerable and tormented outsiders. She translated their work, and wrote powerful studies of figures such as Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Hölderlin and Cora Sandel. Her essays shows the extent of her identification with them: ‘Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with an extreme and almost intolerable intensity.’

David McDuff’s edition includes selections from Mirjam Tuominen’s poetry and stories, as well as her seminal essay Victim and Tormentor. The book is introduced by her daughter, the writer Tuva Korsström.

Karin Boye is one of the most distinguished poets of modern Swedish literature. Her poetry is naturally mystical and possesses great intellectual clarity, containing both ‘the softness of the flower and the brittle toughness of the ice-crystal’. — Lauri Viljanen

The Cool Day (1961), The Courtyard (1969) and Years Like Leaves (1989) are combined in Homecoming, translated by David McDuff, who also translated Carpelan’s classic novel Axel (Carcanet, 1989; Paladin, 1990). The Courtyard poems are enriched with memories of his 1930s childhood in Helsingfors, the verse rooted in a specific place and time.

Tua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her breakthrough came when she was still only 30 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard, which brought her international recognition, with its English translation by David McDuff winning a Poetry Book Society Translation Award.

In the 1930s, Bo Carpelan found mention of his great-uncle Axel in a biography of the composer Jean Sibelius. This friendship is the genesis of Carpelan’s fictional diary of Axel’s dual obsession with music and with a man who, unlike him, had enough confidence in his creativity to compose his own.

Much of the literature of Finland is written not in Finnish but in Swedish, for Finland was a province of Sweden until the 19th century, and Swedish was its official language. Even after Finland passed into Russian hands in 1808, Finland-Swedes continued to dominate the country’s economic and public life, and while their poetry became a potent force for the assertion of Finland’s national identity, Swedish gradually gave way to Finnish as the dominant language of the national literature. Against this background it is easy to see how isolation became a central theme in Finland-Swedish poetry. Finnish writers are said to be obsessed by loneliness and melancholy, and to fill their books with descriptions of night and winter, frozen lakes and pine forests. Yet while Finland-Swedish poets pack quite enough snow and ice into their lines, their work is full of vitality, surprisingly different and sharply aware of the rest of European literature.

First published in 1984, this is a translation of the Samlade Dikter published by Wahlström & Widstrand in Helsingfors in 1949 and edited by Gunnar Tideström. It was the first complete English version of that volume, and the first major collection of the poet’s work to appear in England. It also contains an account of Edith Södergran’s life.