Wendela Hebbe

Wendela Hebbe née Åström (9 September 1808, Jönköping – 27 August 1899, Stockholm), was a Swedish journalist, writer, and salon hostess.

[1] She had a significant place in the radical literary circles of mid 19th-century Sweden and was a controversial role model for the emancipated woman.

Wendela Hebbe was the eldest of three daughters of the parish vicar Anders Samuel Åstrand and Maria Lund.

In 1839, her spouse went bankrupt and fled the country: first to England, he eventually emigrated to the United States, and Wendela Hebbe was left to support herself and her daughters alone.

She settled in Jönköping, and started to work in the only profession regarded socially acceptable for an educated woman at the time: she became a teacher and gave lessons in music, singing and drawing, which was only barely enough to support herself.

[4] Outside of her personal production, she made a valuable historical contribution by writing down old traditional folk lore stories and songs.

[4] To her circle of belonged Johan Jolin, Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and also Magnus Jacob Crusenstolpe, whom she supported in his struggle for freedom of speech.

A particular friendship was that of Carl Jonas Love Almquist,[2] whose work as a writer she admired, as they shared an interest in social criticism.

She also reportedly played an important part as an adviser and secretary in the creation of the compositions of Almquist, notably his Songes, according to her daughter Signe Hebbe, who remembered her mother and Almquist sitting by the piano during his compositions: "In the early 40s, when many of A[lmquist]:s songs were completed, Almqvist demonstrated by a finger on the musical keyboard what tone he desired.

[4] Her home continued to be a meeting place for decades, even after an illness left her unable to walk in 1878, and she was later to be acquainted with Ellen Key and Herman Sätherberg, whose poems she composed music to.

Gösta Lundström said of her: The writer and journalist Jane Gernandt- Claine described her: Wendela Hebbe was much courted by contemporary male artists but is described as without vanity.