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Minna Canth
Minna Canth (née Johnsson) was the daughter of a merchant. She went to the Kuopio public girls’ school and started at the Jyväskylä Teacher
Seminary in 1863. She resigned from the Seminary to marry Johan Fredrik Canth, a lecturer
at the Seminary. Between 1874 and 1879 Minna Canth wrote short stories and articles on women’s and temperance issues for the newspapers “Keski-Suomi” and “Päijänne”. After her husband died in 1880 she moved to Kuopio and started to run her father’s shop to support her seven children.
In her writings on women’s issues she emphasized the questions of morality and of girls’ education. She criticized the system that taught girls useless things rather than the skills that they needed in life. Minna Canth dealt with social issues in her writings for newspapers, her novels and her plays. Her stories also held peasant women in high esteem. In the words of Kai Laitinen (a literary critic and researcher) “Minna Canth was the purest dramatist of her day in Finnish literature” and “she had the talent to strike without hesitation at the key issues of the age.” Below is a rough translation of an extract from one of her novels: “Mean they were to the poor and the feeble, even when they pretended to help. It were better if they took life altogether instead of keeping others in need and squalor. But nobody would fend for the poor; people, every last one of them, were all too ready to persecute and to add insult to injury. This she felt so keenly, whenever she thought about the fates of her children. They would get more than their fair share of burdens and neglect, no days of joy would brighten their lives. Little Anni in her cradle - who knew what would become of her? She might grow to be pretty, for a proper little angel she was now with her blue eyes and white locks. But that might be the greatest danger of all. A girl beautiful but poor would soon fall into a bad situation.”
(from Köyhää Kansaa, 1883)
Works by Minna Canth:
Murtovarkaus (1882), Roinilan talossa (1883), Sources: Jyväskylän seminaari 1863 - 1937, Huhtala Liisi (ed.), Monisärmäinen Minna Canth, Laitinen Kai, Suomen kirjallisuuden historia.
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