23 Oct 2025, 18:00

UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Masaryk Room, 16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW

The Modern Humanities Research Association is delighted to announce the publication of volume 11 in our Jewelled Tortoise series: Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman by L. Onerva, translated by Eva Buchwald with an introduction and notes by Viola Parente-Čapková.

L. Onerva (the pen name of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882-1972) was one of the most versatile literary figures of her generation, and her novel Mirdja is among the most important works of Nordic fin-de-siècle literature. It recounts the life of its free-spirited protagonist from adolescence to old age as she navigates the gendered world around her, testing the boundaries of her sexuality and railing against conventionality. Onerva’s candid, subversive depiction of society’s norms and traditions creates a vivid backdrop to her heroine’s defiant quest for self-determination.

Mirdja sharply divided the opinions of the contemporary reading public, winning the National Prize for Literature while being widely condemned for immorality. An example of early Modernist writing, described as having Decadent and Nietzschean tendencies, the novel has since been re-evaluated in light of feminist criticism and new trends in scholarship on fin-de-siècle culture and New Woman fiction. Just as her protagonist rebels against the constraints of bourgeois norms, so Onerva challenged the conventions of prose to create an experimental, vividly individualistic form of expression. This fully annotated translation brings this remarkable work of Decadent literature to an English readership for the first time.