Croatian Women Writers from the ‘Moderna’ to the Second World War

Abstract

The turn of the century brought major changes: Croatian women writers were able to unite pedagogical, literary and journalistic activity with new cultural and educational circumstances, and an interest in the feminist ideas coming in from the larger European centres. Although they still had also to fight for their rightful intellectual and literary place, they were pre-pared to do so and succeeded in making the best possible use of what the new age offered them. They were particularly drawn to short narrative forms, such as the novella, the sketch, the short story, impressionistic poetic prose, and prose poetry. At this time the short story tended to favour psychological analysis, which emerged as particularly appropriate for expressing the complex inner workings of the female psyche. Under the influence of ideas about women’s rights there was a change in attitudes to woman as a literary subject. After the Utopian, idealized, or else demonized female figures in Croatian literature of the nineteenth century, women characters now assumed more realistic attributes. They became women of flesh and blood, individuals who thought and acted, with human qualities, more complex inner processes. In short prose pieces, Croatian women writers concerned themselves first of all with an investigation of various aspects of female sensibility, then the metaphysics of marriage, love, personal freedom, various variants of male-female relations.