A remark of her mother’s—that her daughter surely could not be meant to write novels, because the main questions for her were “the questions of her own soul”—opened her eyes to the truth that fiction could not be her vocation. But she was very far from knowing what her life’s work was to be, and her dreams were of love and motherhood, not of a career. With Björnson she was throughout in friendly relationship. He had recognised her fine abilities before she even began to write, and she on her side was full of admiration for his genius, strength, and goodness. The other world-famous writer of Scandinavia Ellen Key learned to know through his work at the age of eighteen, when her mother presented to her _Love’s Comedy_, _Brand_, and _Peer Gynt_; this also was an influential event in her life. Among writers to whom she was later attracted were Elizabeth B. Browning, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Ruskin. At the age of twenty-three, Ellen Key began those constant excursions to all the great centres of Europe, which may be said never since to have ceased, at first in the company of her father, whose secretary, confidant, and almost co-worker she had become, and she was thus gradually led to writing for journals. A love of art seems to have been a primary inspiration of these early journeys, for at this time Ellen Key was fascinated by the art of painting as she has always been by the greater art of living, and her wide knowledge of pictures has often happily illuminated her later writings. After 1880, however, when her father, as the result of an agricultural crisis, lost his property, she was compelled, at the age of thirty, to choose a career and for a time became a teacher in a girls’ school. She had always been attracted to teaching and many years earlier, at the instigation of Björnson, had studied the school system of Denmark. At a later period she gave courses of lectures in literature, history, and æsthetics. For twenty years she occupied the Chair of History of Civilisation in Sweden at the Popular University of Stockholm.