Stella Kleve

Ingrid Mathilda Kruse Malling (Jan 20, 1864 – Mar 21, 1942), known as Mathilda Malling, and even better known by her early nom de plume, Stella Kleve, was a Swedish novelist born January 20, 1864, on her family's farm, in North Mellby Parish, Kristianstad County, Sweden and died in København, Esajas sn, Sjælland, Copenhagen in 1942. Daughter of Danish estate owner, Frans Oskar Kruse, and Anna Maria Mathilda Borgström, she graduated from Lyceum for Girls in , then studied at Lund University, in Switzerland, in 1884, and in Copenhagen, 1885-1886. In 1883 and was married in 1890 to merchant Peter Malling in Copenhagen.

Malling debuted in 1885 with the novel Berta Funcke, followed in 1888 by the novel Alice Brandt, both published under the pseudonym Stella Kleve. In 1886, she published the novel Pyrrhussegrar (Pyrrhic Victories) in the progressive feminist publication Framåt ('Forward') by Alma Åkermark. Her contemporaries took note of her sensually colored depictions of young women, but posterity now considers her decadent late-naturalistic depiction of women as the female counterpart of the male breakthrough novels of this time. She had early contact with Ola Hansson who frequently corresponded with her and also courted and proposed to her. Hansen portrayed, after a difficult break-up with Malling, as a woman of the future. The young poets and the students Emil Kléen and Albert Sahlin wanted to do a small decadent publication (which never came out) in the late 1880s, but failed to persuade her. Anti-Semitism and misogyny in the decadence literary style have been the source of much scholarship.

Detracting from presumed feminism, Malling's novel, Daybreak, published in 1906 by a respected "magazine of the world's best fiction," depicts entirely real characters and settings, by name, thus promoting the vilification of an early American feminist leader of native people. Today, the reader is impressed by its sensational, even slanderous, quality. The very real Mary Brant, and her culture, might well have considered such 'fictions' to be but a form of highly influential propaganda, presented with a thin veneer of fiction, and meant to degrade Brant, who was an influential Mohawk and the consort of Sir William Johnson.

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