Although Selma Lagerlof won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909, her name is known in this country--if at all--as author of a children's book only. All her other works, including novels and feminist essays, have been unavailable in English for almost fifty years. In 1911, she made a speech entitled "Home and State" to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress. She argued, first, that the Home was the creation of woman and the place where the values of women were nourished and protected. The Home was a community where "punishment is not for the sake of revenge, but for training and education," where "there is a use for all talents, but [she] who is without can make [her] self as much loved as the cleverest." It was the "storehouse for the songs and legends of our fore-fathers," and, she said, "there is nothing more mobile, more merciful amongst the creations of [humankind]." Although not all homes are good, good and happy homes do sometimes exist. Men by themselves, on the other hand, were responsible for creating the State which "continually gives cause for discontent and bitterness." There has never been a State which could satisfy all its members, which did not ask to be reformed from its very foundations. Yet it is through the State that humankind will reach its highest hopes. Her conclusion: women must add their special virtues, what she calls "God's spirit," to the "law and order" goals of men. Selma Lagerlof's own home was a community of family and servants, within which she experienced profound affections--for the nursemaid who carried her as a crippled child upon her back, for the old housekeeper, her younger sister, her grandmother who told the children stories every afternoon. She never married; she spent her entire life within communities of women, and her career could be described as the author being handed up to greatness by a procession of women who gave encouragement, advice, editorial help, criticism, contacts, companionship. She called Frederika Bremer the first feminist and "last old Mamsell" of Sweden, meaning that Frederika Bremer's life's work had banished the "old maid" from the realm of pitiful figures. Selma Lagerlof was herself proof of her statement. In The Treasure, written midway between her farewell to Frederika Bremer and her plea for woman suffrage, the men are interested in money, murder, and revenge. They miss the evil apparent even to their dogs. When the old mistress (and who should know better that the home is threatened?) warns that knives are being sharpened two miles away, her lord refuses to believe that she could hear what he cannot. The fishpeddler's dog has instinct enough to balk and howl, sensing death; the fishpeddler's wife and the woman tavern-keeper respond to the supernatural however little they understand; the men turn their backs on understanding even when they are being implored.