“Magnhild is a victim of that morbid egotism to which the women of Norwegian novels are usually a prey. She has the customary inability to accept the hard facts of lige and make the best of them.
She lives among the usual throng of monsters, mental or physical, who are sketched with Björnson’s painful and perhaps inartistic minuteness. The actions of the various characters in the story are generally preposterous if not maniacal, and altogether the effect which it produces is one of unrelieved gloom and depression.
The sombre dead-level of squalor and horror with which it deals would be apt to get on one’s nerves, and the feckless, shiftless, slatternly Magnhild is, we hope, a character more likely to excite impatience than sympathy in the breast of the healthy British maiden. Probably it would be better is she did not read about her at all.”
Book review: ‘Magnhild’ and ‘Dust’, The Academy, London:1897
