Marriage for Love: A Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Woman's Fight for Justice

<p>How did a penniless nineteenth-century farm woman with an alcoholic husband, seven children, and little education, living in a rural backwater of the tsarist Russian empire far from any centers of culture manage to become the initiator of literary prose fiction in the Lithuanian language and write six volumes of stories, plays, and letters? Not only that, but she also distinguished herself as a feminist activist against patriarchy, especially the centuries-long tradition of arranged marriages. During the First World War she traveled the United States for five years, giving speeches from Chicago to New Hampshire for the cause of relieving the famine and suffering of her war-torn country.</p>

Literature & Fiction

Žemaitė'

Literary

Birchwood Press

<p>This story, by one of Europeâe(tm)s most skilful practitioners of the art of short fiction, has now been translated into English for the first time. ZosÄ--, a beautiful, diligent and innocent peasant girl, works as a maid in the service of a wealthy country estate. Courted by the local young men and resistant to the attentions of her master, who forces himself upon her, she is in fact wholly in love with Tofylis, the huntsman. But Tofylisâe(tm)s good looks and practised seduction manoeuvres have blinded her to his brutishness and faux sophistication. This simple tale from 1897 is made deeply complex by &#65533;½emaitÄ--âe(tm)s acute, compassionate eye and ear for the lives of the lower classes in Lithuania at the time. As a depiction of patriarchal attitudes, coercive control and the limited options facing poor women, it has remarkable contemporary resonance.</p>

Tofylis, or The Marriage of Zosė

Short Stories & Anthologies

Paper + Ink

Apsakymai

Umbrasaitė, Rimantė

Vaga

Autobiografija (Skaitinių serija)

Baltos Lankos

Laimė nutekėjimo: Apsakymų ciklas (Skaitinių serija)

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Books by Žemaitė'