In the 1930s, the golden age of modern Swedish literature, Moa Martinson and Agnes von Krusenstjerna were the only female newcomers of any distinction. While Krusenstjerna chronicled the mores of the upper middle class, Martinson belonged to the influential group of "autodidacts," self-educated writers of working-class origins--such as Eyvind Johnson, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Arthur Lundkvist, and Harry Martinson, Moa Martinson's second husband. Into their world of the proletarian male outsider, a world that for these writers embodied salvation from social constraints--thus approaching vitalism, or primitivism--Martinson introduced a counterpart: the proletarian New Woman, whose perspectives on sexuality and reproduction departed radically from those of her male contemporaries. Through her books of the 1930s, she engaged in a polemical dialogue with her male colleagues of--in the words of the Anglo-Swedish Review (December 1934)--the "primitivist school of phallic worshippers." Martinson proposed to make literature out of "ded otydda livets skrift" (the unwritten...