In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV for emancipation from her brother's wardship; in her 50s, her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all unmarried Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden's first female tertiary school.

Fredrika Bremer was born into a Swedish-speaking Finnish[1][2] family on 17 August 1801[3] at Tuorla Manor in Piikkiö Parish outside of Åbo, Sweden (now Turku, Finland).

[4][a] Her grandparents Jacob and Ulrika Fredrika Bremer had built up one of the largest business empires in Swedish Finland but, upon his mother's death in 1798, Carl liquidated their holdings.

Fredrika passed the next two decades of her life[6] summering there[5] and at another nearby estate owned by her father,[6] spending winter in the family's Stockholm apartment.

They were given the education then conventional for girls of their class in Sweden, with private tutors followed by a family trip through Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands in 1821 and 1822 before their social debuts.

[9] Bremer found the limited and passive family life of Swedish women of her time suffocating and frustrating[10] and her own education was unusually strict,[6] with rigid timetables governing her days.

[5] She described her family as "under the oppression of a male iron hand":[10][b] While in Stockholm, the girls were forbidden from playing outside and took their exercise by jumping up and down while holding onto the backs of chairs.

[10] She was considered awkward and rebellious throughout her childhood;[10] and one of her sisters later wrote of how she enjoyed cutting off parts of her dresses and curtains and throwing things into the fire to watch them burn.

[10] (She had written an outraged retort against the male "tyranny" espoused in Johan Olof Wallin's Lutheran sermon "On the Quiet Calling of Women" the year before but it was only published posthumously.

I would like to become an author to whose works everyone who is sad, depressed, and troubled (and especially everyone of my own sex who is suffering) could go, assured of finding in them a word of redress, of comfort, or encouragement.

The President's Daughters (1834) is considered to represent Bremer's increased maturity, using a well-observed portrayal of childhood for its humor while soberly illustrating a reserved young woman's blossoming into a more open and friendly way of life.

[15] She spent the winter of 1841–42 alone in Årsta Castle, spending her time completing the tract Morning Watches (1842), in which she stated her personal religious belief as a matter of sense first and of mystic revelation second.

[10] In 1842, Bremer ended the self-imposed isolation in which she had lived since Böklin's marriage and returned to Swedish social circles, which she portrayed in her Diary the next year.

She proclaimed that cared little for material possessions: when asked by Carl Gustaf von Brinkman why she could never be an art collector, she replied that "It is certain that nothing worth money would ever be happy with me—even a Swedish Academy medal.

[6] Brockhaus inaugurated its 1841 series Select Library of Foreign Classics (German: Ausgewählte Bibliotek der Classiker des Auslandes) with a translation of Neighbors and its success led them to publish seven other volumes of Bremer's works by the end of the next year.

[i] By then, Mary Howitt had begun publishing English translations in London and New York;[19] these proved even more popular in England and United States than the original works had been in Sweden, ensuring her warm welcomes while overseas.

Her 1846 visit to the Rhineland prompted her 1848 volumes A Few Leaves from the Banks of the Rhine, Midsummer Journey, and Sibling Life, the last recounting her impressions of the tensions leading up to the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in France.

[16] She spent six weeks in Britain,[10] visiting Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London and meeting Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot.

Following her return to Sweden in November, Bremer attempted to engage its middle- and upper-class ladies in social work similar to what she had found in America and England.

[25] On 28 August 1854, amid the Crimean War, the London Times published her "Invitation to a Peace Alliance" alongside an editorial rebuke of its contents: a pacifist appeal to Christian women.

[22] In 1856, she published her novel Hertha as A Sketch from Real Life and concluded its fictionalized assault on the 2nd-class status of adult unmarried women under the 1734 Civil Code with an appendix recounting recent Swedish court cases on the topic.

[16] Finally, she left Messina for Malta and thence traveled to Palestine, arriving on 30 January 1859[10] and, though nearly 60 years old, tracing the life of Jesus Christ by ship, train, wagon, and horseback.

Fredrika Bremer's novels were usually romantic stories of the time, typically concerning an independent woman narrating her observations of others negotiating the marriage market.

[27] Reflecting her own childhood, many of her works include a sharp urban/rural dichotomy; without exception, these present nature as a place of renewal, revelation, and self-discovery.

[16] She was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman[31] and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women includes a scene of Mrs March reading from Bremer's works to her four daughters.

[35] In 1854, she co-founded the Women's Society for the Improvement of Prisoners (Fruntimmersällskapet för fångars förbättring) together with Mathilda Foy, Maria Cederschiöld, Betty Ehrenborg and Emilia Elmblad.

At the electoral reforms regarding the right to vote of 1862, she supported the idea to give women the right to vote, which was talked about as the "horrific sight" of seeing "crinolines at the election boxes", but Bremer gave the idea her support, and the same year, women of legal majority were granted suffrage in municipal elections in Sweden.