This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception
of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian,
and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the
nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component
of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle
Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look
at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in
translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic
dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of
intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as
cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and
transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also
investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that
time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for
girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to
examine the question of reception broadly.