Strindberg and Love

August Strindberg was always attracted to independent, artistic women and altogether he was married to three - two actresses and one writer - and he proposed to a fourth, who was initially an actress and later became a professional painter. These four women - Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl, Harriet Bosse and Fanny Falkner - are the subjects of this book.
Whenever he fell in love Strindberg always felt that he had surrendered his soul. He turned the women he adored into goddesses and so when they inevitably failed to live up to his idealized image of them he became disillusioned and fought back through his writing. He always believed that he could transform the pain of loss into poetry and declared that life was only material for dramas - mainly tragedies.
In Strindberg and Love Eivor Martinus dissects Strindberg''s relationships with women in all their complexity and builds up a picture of a romantic literary genius and those who loved him.