It was made into a 1924 silent film directed by Mauritz Stiller starring Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson and Gerda Lundequist.

Lagerlöf entered the contest with a few chapters from Gösta Berling, a story which was then beginning to take shape in her mind, and won the prize.

As a child, she had absorbed the folk tales of her surroundings, and later on in life it occurred to her like a lightning flash that it was her particular mission to give these stories expression.

[1] Using wolves, snow, supernatural elements and eccentric upper-class characters to project an exotic image of 1820s Värmland, the novel can be compared to magic realism.

The most recent English translation, by Paul Norlen, was published in 2009 by Penguin Books under the title The Saga of Gösta Berling.