SKRAM, AMALIE

ne Alver born Aug. 22, 1846/47, Bergen, Nor. died March 15, 1905, Copenhagen novelist, one of the foremost Naturalist writers of her time in Norway. The daughter of an unsuccessful speculator, Skram had an unhappy childhood in a divided home. She grew up to be a lovely and admired woman, but she was disappointed by her early marriage to an older man, which ended in divorce. She later married a Danish writer, Erik Skram. Her early life seems to have had a strong effect on her writing and to have been in part responsible for her extreme pessimism. Many of her works deal with unhappy marriages. She was convinced that humanity was entirely subjected to the tyranny of natural laws. Her best work is a tetralogy, considered the classic of Norwegian Naturalism, Hellemyrsfolket (188798; People of Hellemyr), in which she tells of the relations of a family over four generations, of family ambitions and inferiority feelings, and of family decay. One of her works, Professor Hieronymus (1895; Eng. trans. 1899), is not a novel but a vivid description of her treatment for a nervous disorder.