Fourfold Female: Birgithe Kühle’s Pioneer Norwegian Journal Provincial-Lecture (1794) and Her European Book Collection

This article focuses on Birgithe Kühle (1762‒1832), editor of the weekly journal Provincial-Lecture [Provincial Reading] (1794) and the first known female periodical editor in Denmark-Norway. The article discusses her editorial strategies and sources and assesses her dependency on contemporary and past European culture. It also considers the presence of provincial versus central Western European influences, and of male versus female authors in a double decentring of late-eighteenth-century cultural perspectives. It does so by examining the four roles of editor, translator, book owner, and printer-publisher underpinning the production of the periodical, all adopted by women and all but one undertaken by Kühle herself.

In this article, I study her strategies and sources and assess her dependency on contemporary and past European culture. I also consider the presence of provincial versus central Western European influences, and of male versus female authorship in a double decentring of late-eighteenth-century cultural perspectives. I do so by considering the four roles of editor, translator, book owner, and publisher underpinning the production of the periodical, all adopted by women and all but one undertaken by Kühle herself.

A Female Editor
Birgithe Kühle's life is a remarkable testimony to women's capacities for balancing cultural participation with family responsibilities. Not only was she an editor, translator, and writer, according to one of our very few sources about Birgithe Kühle -a biography of her husband compiled by family members -she also bore twenty-three children between 1779 and 1802, from the age of eighteen to forty.2 By 1794, the year she edited her journal, she had a new-born baby and ten previous births behind her and had suffered the loss of at least three of her children -personal circumstances that were hardly conducive to professional writing and editorship. Danish by birth, Birgithe Lykke Solberg was born on 16 January 1762 in Copenhagen, married in 1779, and died on 27 March 1832 in the Danish village of Sønderby. (Fig. 1) However, the family lived in Bergen, Norway for sixteen years, from 1786 to 1802, and this is the period and site of her editorship as well as her childbearing. Now two different countries, Denmark-Norway was approaching the end (in 1814) of a four-centuries-long union, whose official language was Danish and joint capital was Copenhagen. Bergen was then Norway's largest and most international city. It was twice the size of Christiania (now Oslo); but with circa 14,000 inhabitants, it was still of moderate proportions and means.3 The Kühle family records state that 'even though Mrs Birgithe continued to bear a child every year, she did gradually find the courage to contribute to the cultivation of the city'.4 Compared to her native Copenhagen, with around 80,000 inhabitants, Bergen was evidently considered 'raw' and in need of improvement. The family records reveal  Tatler from 1709 to 1711 and Steele and Joseph Addison's the Spectator from 1711 to 1712. The immediacy of these journals and their proximity to their readers as they reported on the current talk of the coffee-houses and latest issues of debate required vivid and flexible forms of publication rather than firmly set and long-running traditions. Harald Tveterås's chronological list of Norwegian periodicals shows that Birgithe Kühle's end-of-century journal was the thirtieth of a total of thirty-seven titles published between 1700 and 1799.7 Even in a small country, before its national independence, the periodical was a prominent medium for the new enlightened public readership, as is also convincingly argued in a recent study by Ellen Krefting, Aina Nøding, and 5 'Bladet var efter vore Forhold meget ubetydeligt. '  Women's earliest involvement with the Nordic press was as owners in the seventeenth century, when widows inherited their husbands' publishing houses. Although women started to contribute actively to the press from the eighteenth century onwards, they did not become fully-fledged journalists until the mid-nineteenth century. 10 Kühle is sometimes considered the first woman journalist in Norway, since she not only assembled her material, but also edited, rewrote, and translated it, and presented it for her readers in a personal voice. However, she was not the first Norwegian female journalist in the modern sense of a reporter or correspondent -this was rather the novelist and travel writer Marie Colban (1814-84), who wrote articles from Paris for Norwegian newspapers from 1856. Instead, Kühle's method, like her immediate forerunner Claus Fasting's, was 'cut-and-paste' journalism, to 'write with scissors', selecting and collating material from various sources for use in her own journal. 11 Despite being a pioneer woman editor, Birgithe Kühle did not, in fact, reveal her gender in Provincial-Lecture, nor did she target an exclusively female readership. Her name does not appear on the title page, or anywhere else in the journal, and she signed her foreword 'udgiv.' ['the editor'].12 'If anything, the publication bears a credible male mask, since the editor's persona, editing strategies, educational purposes, and reliance on 'cut-and-paste' journalism are all in line with the tradition established by Kühle's male forerunners. This anonymity is rather to be expected in the eighteenth-century press, as anonymous and pseudonymous publication were widely practiced strategies for hiding authorial and editorial identity and creating a public voice. 13 Kühle's predecessor, Fasting, and their joint sources, Addison, Steele, and Jonathan Swift, were likewise anonymous editors with a strong editorial voice. However, Kühle was not elsewhere averse to publishing in her own name, as two poetry volumes published in 1800 and 1802 are both signed.

A Female Translator
Although Reidun Kvaale's 1986 history of women journalists discusses Birgithe Kühle only as editor, she refers to an earlier student paper documenting that Kühle not only rewrote her sources to fit the format of Provincial-Lecture, but also translated much of the content herself.14 Provincial-Lecture's fifty-two issues contain material translated from at least three languages, English, French, and Swedish. While we do not know for certain what foreign languages Kühle mastered, we have several indications from which to infer her linguistic skills. The first is her professed enjoyment of foreign reading, by which she likely meant in the original languages. 15 The second is her surprising preference for English journals, which stands in contrast to the predominance of French and German among educated Norwegian men of the period. Boys who received an education, such as Claus Fasting, would learn Latin first and modern languages later, and English was not necessarily one of them. 16 English would only gradually gain ground as a first foreign language over the following century, primarily in trade and maritime rather than in academic contexts.
Moreover, with regard to Kühle's work as a translator, there appears to have been a synergy between her periodical editorship and another cultural role that she took on during these years, namely the forming of a pioneer Norwegian theatre. It is likely that she translated for both these channels simultaneously. In 1794, the year in which Provincial-Lecture appeared, Birgithe and Carl Kühle became the driving forces behind the establishment of the Bergen Dramatic Society; he as founder and director, she as leader of the participating ladies. 17  The repertoire started locally with the Bergen playwright (later bishop) Johan Nordahl Brun, but quickly became international, with plays harvested primarily from German bourgeois drama and light French comedies. The first foreign play was August von Kotzebue's notoriously successful Das Kind der Liebe (1780), performed as Elskovsbarnet in Bergen in March 1794. 19 Notably, this was four years before its London production in Elizabeth Inchbald's translation Lovers' Vows (1798), now remembered for its pivotal role in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814).20 Whereas Inchbald's name appeared on the title page of Lovers' Vows, the Norwegian translator of Kotzebue's play was not named, which was common for translators regardless of sex. However, Kühle is a candidate because she was an active translator who probably selected this piece with her husband and other leaders of the theatre group. She was not the sole female translator in Denmark-Norway, although they were often either unnamed or sometimes

A Female Book Owner
The first issue of Provincial-Lecture opened with an address to the readers in which the editor claimed to have assembled a book collection from which materials for the journal would be harvested: I, who at great cost have procured myself a collection, not only of English, but even French and Swedish journals, and hereby learnt to distinguish the best, have decided to publish a weekly magazine of Danish translations, under the name of Provincial-Lecture, which is to emulate the English journals.23 Although the address emphasized the editor's personal effort ('I'; 'at great cost'), Kühle was most likely adopting another male mask, that of the book owner. Few Norwegian women at the time could build their own book collections. Book historian Elisabeth S. Eide points out that there is little documentation that women of the bourgeoisie were book-buyers, stating cautiously that Kühle was 'a well-read lady, but whether she owned a book collection of her own is not known'.24 If she did, it is unlikely that she was the sole owner of a private library; we must assume it was a library that she owned jointly with her husband. The collection would therefore have been as much a testimony of his taste as hers, although the spouses evidently shared the same interest in theatre and cultural life.
Because the collection has not survived and there is no inventory, we do not know for certain what books and periodicals the Kühles owned, how many, and in what genres and languages. The contents of Provincial-Lecture, however, gives us some idea of the diversity of the materials to which Birgithe Kühle had access. The periodical encompassed popular science, travelogues, fiction, poetry, practical household advice, letters, and miscellaneous other texts. It is an amalgam of texts, often translated and recycled without explanations or references. It is tempting to try and discover the sources of the translations, in order to shed light on how they were imported into a Scandinavian context and, in particular, on the periodical's indebtedness to English models. In what follows, I situate this process of textual transfer on three axes: local-global, old-new, and male-female. Did Kühle, for example, mix domestic and foreign sources? Is there a preference for historical or recent authors? Are there traces of female pens among the male?
As for the local-global axis, the concept of the 'provincial' is worth considering. In the context of the eighteenth-century Norwegian press, 'provincial' on the one hand reflects the distance from Denmark and the joint capital, Copenhagen, where most periodicals were published. It is in this sense of the word that Elisabeth Aasen finds The quotation helped Kühle establish the periodical in a male-dominated international tradition: it conveyed a certain ironic distance from worldly matters, an attitude that was also seen as fitting for periodical editors at the time.
Provincial-Lecture's motto may be in French, but the first topic discussed by the editor is English. The opening address entitled 'Til Laeserne!' ['To the Readers!'] praises the 'qualities of the English journals' which the periodical seeks to emulate, arguing that 'anyone who knows […] their excellent value will soon realize the great usefulness of such writings, and the general enlightenment of the English nation is the happy effect of them'.27 Kühle's clear preference for English sources is a novel occurrence compared to her most important predecessor, Claus Fasting. It suggests that the Kühle library must have been decidedly more oriented towards England than Fasting's was fifteen years earlier. Fasting's book collection, which unlike the Kühles' has been preserved and is currently held by the University of Bergen Library, contained only a few English titles; many more were French and German. Moreover, Fasting evidently preferred to read English works in German translation, which at the time would have been more easily accessible than the originals.28 Her cultural orientation also extended to other As for the old-new axis, the topics and style of Provincial-Lecture bear witness to early-century Enlightenment ideals more than to 1790s revolutionary ideas. There is no Mary Wollstonecraft, although A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had been published only two years earlier. The closest Kühle gets to contemporary revolutionaries is Benjamin Franklin, who had died in 1790, and whose self-composed epitaph she includes, in translation, in the penultimate issue.29 Kühle's frame of reference is not Samuel Johnson's journal the Rambler (1750-52), but the earlier pioneers Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who would serve as models for so many eighteenth-century editors. Kühle's references to a multi-volume work suggests that she had access to the Tatler through one of the many editions of The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., a collection of the Tatler essays.30 Richard Steele is a ubiquitous unnamed presence in the journal, the shadow looking over the editor's shoulder. He is one of the authors most often quoted, yet he is almost invariably identified by means of his famous nom de plume, Isaac Bickerstaff.   42 The assumption that Gordon was still in prison suggests that Kühle translated the account from a source that was published while Gordon was still alive and that she was unaware of his death the year before.43 The rest of the periodical was a mixture of informative pieces and prose fiction. Potentially life-saving advice was offered in an article about reviving a strangled or suffocated person, accompanied by a story of an unhappy nurse who found a lifeless child. 44 Other pieces informed readers on how to bleach linen and how the telegraph worked.45 Because of the short format of the journal, the fiction is usually serialized, with a promise of continuation in the next issue, sometimes simply in the form of a casual 'Resten følger' ['The rest will follow'] or 'en anden Gang' ['some other time'].46 There is, for example, an epistolary story with an English setting published in eight instalments and consisting of a series of letters between 'Frederic' and 'Louise'. In a note heading the first instalment, the editor claims that the letters 'ved en Haendelse' ['accidentally'] came into the possession of a certain 'G. M.', who vouched for their authenticity despite admitting that the authors' names were fictional.47 Another anonymous tale is called 'Velgiørenhed: En østerlandsk Historie' ['Charity: A Story from the East'] but this spanned only two issues.48 Serial fiction went on to become a major literary form in the periodical press, but pre-1800 serializations such as these serve to modify the perception of it as a nineteenth-century phenomenon.
While a closer examination of the many unsigned and unidentified pieces in Provincial-Lecture is needed, these examples already indicate that Kühle had access to a book collection that was contemporary and topical as well as historical and classic. They also suggest that one contemporary critic's comment that 'et halvt Aar plagede hun sine Laesere med Opkaag af gamle Romaner og Elskovsbreve' ['for half a year she tormented her readers with rehashings of old novels and love letters'] was likely more the result of prejudice towards the editor's sex than of a full and balanced review of the periodical's contents.49 Even though translating foreign materials was seen as more acceptable for a woman than writing her own texts, Kühle was still subject

The Female Printer-Publisher
The fourth female role in the production of Provincial-Lecture was the printer-publisher, although in this case it was not Birgithe Kühle herself. While it is hardly surprising that she did not own a printing press, it is perhaps more unexpected to find women printers at all at the time.

Conclusion: A Female Voice Recovered
Birgithe Kühle's 1794 journal Provincial-Lecture provides ample evidence of the transfer of Western European reading matter to a peripheral, Norwegian readership. More specifically, it showcases the budding Nordic interest in English written culture, which would blossom in the following century. The journal's mixture of long-standing, perceived classic authors with newer concerns and names indicates a broad target audience that should be entertained as well as informed by snapshots from the greater world. Furthermore, the journal's reliance on translations of foreign texts as its main matter -at the cost of domestic texts -points to the distinctively transnational nature of literary exchanges in the eighteenth century. Small countries especially relied on the import of texts to fill the demand of the growing readership and the flourishing new channels of publication opened up by the periodical press. By harvesting materials from her European book collection for the small, weekly format of eight pages of translated and refashioned pieces, editor Kühle joined in on the endless, ongoing recycling of cultural texts for local purposes.
Birgithe Kühle may not have been an editor of or for women, and others have done more to circulate women's texts. Nevertheless, Provincial-Lecture is a valuable testimony of female contributions to the European culture of the 1790s, as a woman's initiative demonstrating the different roles women took on for the periodical press. Provincial-Lecture was not only edited by a woman and based on a (jointly owned) book collection, it also bears the imprint of a female printer-publisher, and above all, demonstrates a woman's penmanship and voice as a translator and mediator of foreign-language texts. As part of a special issue on European women's editorship, the Norwegian case presented here takes its place among a larger reconstruction of women's work of the past that also builds on previous and ongoing projects such as Orlando and NEWW Women Writers. In the next decades, the contributions of more pioneering women will hopefully be uncovered, and our collective cultural memory will continue to be challenged and modified by further evidence of women's significant but otherwise forgotten roles.