Background
Quiding was the daughter of the wealthy brännvinmerchant Johan Henric Lindberg (1719-1777) and his wife Helena Berg (1729-1788).
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Helena Quiding
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Her parents were wealthy and owned real estate on Drottninggatan and Fredsgatan in the centre of Stockholm. The marriage was happy, but her spouse wasted her dowry and the fortune she inherited after her father and apparently persuaded her to forge her rich mother"s name to be able to borrow more money, before he went bankrupt and fled the country in 1781, being trialed in absentia in 1783. In 1788, she inherited a second fortune after her mother and filed for a divorce, and in January 1789, she was formally divorced from her spouse.
In 1790, the year after her divorce, she spent a fortune by having the summer villa Heleneberg built at Djurgården, where she engaged in gardening and entertained culture personalities such as Bellman during the summers for a decade.
Helena Quding and her circle at Heleneberg was the object of many of the poems of Bellman, such as the Djurgårdspastoralerna (Djurgården pastorals). lieutenant is not known when she and Bellman became acquainted, but they were friends by the time of her divorce proceedings in 1788, and he often celebrated her with poems the following years, such as at the inauguration of Heleneberg.
She is described as beautiful, warmhearted but serious, and her life at Heleneberg as idyllic. Apparently, Bellman unsuccessfully attempted to court her at one point, and it is likely that she gave him financial support from time to time.
The summers at Heleneberg ended in 1800 after several years of lawsuits with her neighbor Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz, who questioned her rights to the grounds, when she sold it and started to rent a cottage to spent her summers instead.
