Maja-Lisa Borgman

Maria Elisabeth "Maja-Lisa" Borgman (1750s – 14 May 1791), was the owner of a famed coffee house in Stockholm during the reign of Gustav III of Sweden and a known local profile in contemporary Gustavian Stockholm.

Coffee houses became common in Stockholm in the 1720s and had a reputation as the center of public intellectual debate, as they normally offered newspaper-reading parlors, where the customers were offered to read the latest newspapers and discuss the latest news.

[2] In the Stockholm register of 1790, Borgman is listed as an unmarried Mamsell of 33 or 38 years old, and the head of a household including a boy at the age of nine, a foster daughter, two maidservants, a servant girl and a married woman as an assistant.

During the 1780s, her coffee house was known as the first center for Chess games in Sweden, were the chess players Daniel Djurberg and Olof Samuel Tempelman were frequent guests.

[5] A Chalcography in the National Library of Sweden depicts her with the text: Maja-Lisa Borgman died of a cold.