In the history of the Finnish literary language, there were only men for a long time. It is difficult to find female authors from the period of Old Literary Finland. Women only begin to appear as authors of books in the last decades of the early modern Finnish period, which covers most of the 19th century. Who were these authors, translators and non-fiction writers who can be called the mothers of literary Finland? One of the earliest female poets who wrote in Finnish was Isa Asp (1853–1872), who studied at the Jyväskylä seminary, but who died young and left behind only a few poems.
This is how Minna Canth (1844–1897), who grew up in the same seminary, is remembered by most as the first female writer to use the Finnish language. Canth made his debut with the play Murtovarkaus in 1883, but already in 1878 he had already published Australian B2C Email List short Australian B2C Email List and translations as a book. Language guardian EA Saarimaa (1925) has analyzed the many Savoyard features of the language of Canthi, who spent most of his life in Kuopio, without emphasizing too much that, along with Juhani Aho, it was Canthi's contribution to the Eastern dialect of the literary language at that time that was most significant.
Even before Canthi, however, Theodolinda Hahnsson (1838–1919), an unschooled but privately educated vicar's daughter, had already started her career as a writer, whose first novel Haapakallio was published in 1869. Literary researcher Tyyni Tuulio (1979) has characterized Hahnsson as writing in a natural Western Finnish language, which was enlivened by funny-sounding dialect words. But while Canth's realistic plays and stories are still read and performed, Hahnsson's first work and later productions have long since been forgotten as they are very idealistic in their world of ideas. Students dressed in dresses on the park road, a two-story building in the background.
