[2] She was raised in a happy home and affected strongly by her intellectual mother.

In 1872 she married her cousin, the music book seller Nathan Elkan (1834-1879), with whom she had a daughter, Kerstin (1877-1879).

Her marriage was happy, and the death of both her spouse and daughter in December 1879 with tuberculosis caused a crisis;[2] for the rest of her life, she dressed in black.

As a widow, she began to make translations, publish serials and papers, and debuted as a novelist in 1889.

Her first novel, John Hall – en historia från det gamla Göteborg, was an immediate success.