After graduation she taught at Landskrona, in the province of Skåne, always hoping to find time to write, always meeting disappointments because of the demands of the classroom, often telling orally some of her tales to her pupils after school hours, always returning to her old home, Mårbacka, in vacations and gaining new impetus for her literary aspirations. Her first chapter of _The Story of Gösta Berling_ was composed on a Christmas holiday evening when she, with members of her family, was returning from a party at a distant neighbor’s house. A blizzard was raging and she sat in the sleigh, covered with furs, while the old horse, urged by the aged coachman, tried to plough through the drifts, in defiance of the wild winds. In her mind was formulated that chapter of the Christmas night at the smithy, which is an arresting episode in the complete novel. She made first a metrical version; then she tried it in dramatic form and, finally, wrote it as a short story. Later she wrote other episodes--that of the flood at Ekeby and another of the ball. In 1890, at the urgence of her sister, she sent some of these episodic stories to a prize competition, offered by the magazine, _Idun_, for the best novelette of one hundred pages. A few weeks later the journal announced that some of the manuscripts were “so confusedly written that they could not be considered for the prize”; Miss Lagerlöf was sure that hers was among this rejected class. Then came a telegram, signed by three classmates, with the words, “Hearty Congratulations.”