The article deals with the reception of Matilde Serao in Finland. Reception is understood broadly, as various kinds of reactions to the primary texts about which we have tangible evidence. It means mapping Serao’s presence in the literary field in various ways, employing, in terms of methodology, a compromise between distant and close reading as well as between macro- and micro levels of analysis. By implementing a kind of a meso-analysis, combining the “distant” reading of larger datasets, available online, with the capacity of the close and contextualised reading of the material, I analyse Serao’s multilingual reception in Finland’s library collections, translations (in a book form and in the press) of her works into the two official languages of Finland, Finnish and Swedish, and her reception in the contemporary press in terms of reviews and other articles, advertisements and obituaries. Though I am briefly referring to Serao’s later reception (from the 1930s on), my major concern is with the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is when her reception was at its richest. The results yielded by the research point to a broad, rich reception in all examined sections of the literary field (library collections, translations, and the press), and open many new research questions in the field of gender conscious cultural and literary history and its politics, as well as in the field of methodology of reception studies.