The chapter discusses the female Bildungsroman En qvinna af vår tid: karaktersteckning af Stella [A woman of our time; 1867]. The novel was written by the Russian-Finnish author, countess, and feminist Marie Linder (neé Musin-Pushkin, 1840–1870), and it details the development of the protagonist, Lucy Suffridge. As Linder was a cultural mediator and a carrier of cultural transfer between Russia, Continental Europe and the Nordic countries, space assumes a great importance in her real and imagined life. Since we claim that Linder makes sense of the world by narrating – i.e. mapping it through both real and imagined places – we draw on literary cartography and a semiotic model as a system of spatial dichotomies that mediates non-spatial relations and ideological and moral values. Besides the interplay between the public and private spaces, the gendered cartography involves a personal space of intimacy that appears as a contradictory, even paradoxical phenomenon: it is both empowering and oppressing. The restless mobility characterizing the female Bildung destabilizes the geographies of power, even if the dual architecture of the horizontal and vertical plotlines can hardly be called inherently liberatory. Lucy’s journey to individual freedom is socially motivated, but it still appears as an abstract concept.