Anna Branting (1855–1950)

Anna Branting, née Jäderin, was born in Stockholm, the daughter of a police inspector and his wife. In 1877, she married Gustav Vilhelm von Kraemer, an aristocrat with whom she had two children; the couple divorced in 1883. She remarried the following year to politician Hjalmar Branting, the future Prime Minister of Sweden, with whom she had two more children. She was a pioneering female journalist and theater critic with the Social-Demokraten (The Social Democrat) and Stockholmstidningen (Stockholm Newspaper). She was one of the first 14 women who became members of the Swedish Publicists' Association in 1885. She made her debut as a novelist in 1893 with Lena, en bok om fruntimmer (Lena, a Book About Women), using the pseudonym René. She was one of her era's most popular and bestselling authors. She published her autobiography, Min långa resa : boken om Hjalmar och mig, biografi (My Long Journey: The Book About Hjalmar and Me), in 1945.