Book Launch: Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman by L. Onerva

On 17 October 2025, the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) will host the launch of the English translation of Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman by the Finnish writer L. Onerva (1882–1972).

The translation, carried out by Eva Buchwald, is accompanied by a comprehensive scholarly introduction and detailed annotations by Viola Parente-Čapková, the senior researcher on the project “Emergence of a Civilised Nation: Decadence and Transitionality in 1905‒1940”. This publication marks a significant milestone in making early 20th-century Finnish literature accessible to a wider international readership.

L. Onerva (the pen name of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882-1972) was one of the most versatile literary figures of her generation, and her novel Mirdja is among the most important works of Nordic fin-de-siècle literature. It recounts the life of its free-spirited protagonist from adolescence to old age as she navigates the gendered world around her, testing the boundaries of her sexuality and railing against conventionality. Onerva’s candid, subversive depiction of society’s norms and traditions creates a vivid backdrop to her heroine’s defiant quest for self-determination.

Mirdja sharply divided the opinions of the contemporary reading public, winning the National Prize for Literature while being widely condemned for immorality. An example of early Modernist writing, described as having Decadent and Nietzschean tendencies, the novel has since been re-evaluated in light of feminist criticism and new trends in scholarship on fin-de-siècle culture and New Woman fiction. Just as her protagonist rebels against the constraints of bourgeois norms, so Onerva challenged the conventions of prose to create an experimental, vividly individualistic form of expression. This fully annotated translation brings this remarkable work of Decadent literature to an English readership for the first time.

More information about the book launch can be found here.

A Tapestry of Nordic Decadence – Barbara Burns talks to Eva Buchwald and Viola Parente-Čapková about their work on L. Onerva, Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman, which has just appeared in the MHRA’s Jewelled Tortoise series.