"Hanna's Daughters"

Hanna's Daughters: A Novel of Three Generations is the type of book that one would expect to be on Oprah's book club list, due to its focus on women's histories and lives. Beginning in 1871 and ending in 1986 the lives of Hanna, Johanna, and Anna are traced through personal and social history. Hanna's story is told in a narrative story form, but Johanna and Anna speak from the first person. There is a thread of magic running through the book which never quite solidifies, but maybe that is required in Swedish writing.

The book starts at Hanna's family's farm in Dalsland. After a traumatic rape and pregnancy when only thirteen, Hanna's life assumes a more hopeful trajectory when she is married to a gentleman-miller. As a miller's wife, hunger which had killed four of her siblings, becomes a worry of the past, and Hanna is able to increase her children's fortunes and social status. Due to the geographical proximity to Norway, the threat of war between Norway and Sweden in 1905 was a significant regional catastrophe for the family. The mill, unfortunately dependent upon the region's farmers, falters as the farmers depart en masse for the cities forcing the family to also move. The culture shock experienced by Hanna and her family in Göteborg is intense and exceeded only by the economic shock. The events in these individual's lives mirror those of the larger society in its trend at that time for greater urbanization, greater opportunity and as a result disruption of the social fabric.

So, it is not surprising that Johanna grows up to reject her mother's sense of social order and becomes a socialist. By gaining the education that her mother lacked she also gains the ability to be independent. Despite that Johanna is the most dependant of the characters, thus showing that women's happiness revolves around the men in their life.

Anna provides the framework for this history in that she is writing a book about Hanna and Johanna. As a “modern woman,” who has two daughters of her own, she is attempting to heal her own emotional scars by examining those of her mothers. Beginning and concluding the novel, Anna is the shaper of the narrative and is the most lost of the women because she is the one who must make her own choices without family or society dictating to her.

All in all, this is an excellent book to read on a weekend. One small problem I had with it was the fact that Hanna did not tell her own story. Instead it was told from an omniscient point of view. Though this may have been Marianne Fredriksson's deliberate choice, to show that women have gained more control over the narratives of their lives, Hanna seems to be inordinately slighted in the retelling of her story.