In 1909 Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. By her eightieth birthday she had been translated into forty languages, and her books are still reissued regularly in many languages. Her first novel, Gösta Berlings saga (1891; translated as The Story of Gösta Berling, 1898) was made into a silent movie in 1924 with Greta Garbo. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-1907; translated as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907, and The Further Adventures of Nils, 1911) was commissioned by the Swedish school authorities for primary-school study of Swedish geography and history and was ingeniously devised as the journey of a boy who flies over Sweden on a goose's back. Lagerlöf is a beguiling storyteller, which has caused many critics to fail to recognize her sophistication and subtexts. She belonged to the literary generation in Sweden that succeeded...