Svetla, Caroline (1830–1899)

views updated

Svetla, Caroline (1830–1899)

Czech author and feminist who was one her nation's most influential writers in the 19th century. Name variations: Karolina Svetla or Karolína Světlá Johanna Mužáková or Johanna Muzakova; Johanna Rotová. Born Johanna Rotová on February 24, 1830, in Prague; died on September 7, 1899; married Petr Mužák (a teacher).

Selected writings:

The Cross by the Stream (1868); A Village Novel (1869).

Caroline Svetla, the pseudonym of Johanna Rotová, was born into the family of a wealthy German-Czech merchant in Prague in 1830. She married fellow Czech patriot and teacher Petr Mužák—taking her name from his home village of Světlá—but apparently had more in common with influential Czech writer Jan Neruda, whose lover she became later in life. Like Neruda, in the 1860s and 1870s Svetla was a prominent member of the Máj circle of Czech writers, led by Karen Hynek Mácha , who sought to create a revolutionary literature based on their own liberal views and political nationalism.

Svetla first published her writings in Máj journals, and she devoted much of her career to composing tales of the Prague middle class or stories about the rural lifestyle of those living in the mountains of northern Bohemia. Referring to Svetla as a "strong and even austere moralist, an ardent patriot, a feminist, a liberal thinker, a lover of the mountains and simple peasants," the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature suggests a comparison with George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans ). However, critics of her work among the next generation of Czech writers found it excessively romantic and didactic, especially its unrealistic and artificial plots that often involved conflicted young women. Her stories about the inhabitants of the Ještěd Mountains enjoyed wide readership nevertheless. Later generations of critics perceived an underlying complexity to her writing, recognizing that she used the well-preserved folklore and customs of this region as a backdrop to contemporary moral problems. For example, as noted by Claire Buck, in Svetla's popular novel of 1868, The Cross by the Stream, an intelligent village girl tries to expiate a family curse by subduing an aristocratic brute, thus signifying that servitude was needless. From a literary perspective, critics tend to consider A Village Novel, written in 1869, as her most successful work. In it, according to the Reader's Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature, three women attempt to shape the ideal man. The man's wife represents "pagan materialism," his lover "pure emotion, Nature, Protestantism," and his mother "reason, severe Catholicism." The mother wins and the man earns the respect of his community at the expense of his mental and emotional well-being.

In her later years, Svetla wrote political stories about the revolutions of 1848. She also founded the first serious Czech women's association, the Women's Work Club, in 1871. Four years later, she suffered from nearly total blindness and, for the remainder of her life, had to dictate her work to a niece. Credited with introducing poetic realism to Czech literature, Svetla is regarded as the most influential female Czech prose writer of the 19th century after Božena Němcová . She died in Prague in 1899.