Daughter of Danish estate owner Frans Oskar Kruse and Anna Maria Mathilda Borgström, she graduated from Lyceum for Girls in Stockholm in 1883, then studied at Lund University and in Switzerland in 1884, and in Copenhagen from 1885 to 1886.

[2] Emil Kléen and Albert Sahlin [sv], young poets and students, wanted to include her in a Scanian "decadent calendar" in the late 1880s (which was never published), but failed to persuade her.

[4][circular reference] Detracting from presumed feminism, Malling's novel, Daybreak, published in 1906 by a respected "magazine of the world's best fiction," depicts entirely real characters and settings, by name, thus promoting the vilification of an early American feminist leader of native people.

Everyone in the Colonies knew of the great Sir William Johnson, whom King George II had knighted and made a baronet for his happy influence over the northern tribes of Indians.

Relying on the 'Six Nations' and ruling the region around the Albany mountains as a sovereign, he had built on the Mohawk River his massive stone house, Johnson Hall, which was well fortified and almost resembled a European castle of the middle ages... Sir William's much talked-of mistress, the notorious Molly Brant... Poor Lady Johnson, who loathed and dreaded the 'housekeeper' worse than the plague... virtuous New York matrons bowing and cringing to the 'housekeeper' in the great drawing room...A breakthrough female herself, perhaps insight into Malling's motivation, in scandalizing Brant through fiction, is somewhat explained in the University of Illinois's and Northwestern University's 1918 Scandinavian Studies and Notes: While "a popular writer of considerable talent... it is Mathilda Malling's pride to think that descendants of her own race did something to establish American freedom and they like so many others were resolved not to yield an inch from what they considered right.