Education
She was educated first at a girls school and then at home, and raised in Saint St. Petersburg in Russia.
She was educated first at a girls school and then at home, and raised in Saint St. Petersburg in Russia.
Elisabeth"s parents were the general and wood engraver Konstantin Karlovitj Clodt von Jürgensburg and Catharina Vigné. Elisabeth married August Aleksander Järnefelt on 22 December 1857 at Saint St. Petersburg, and settled with him in Helsinki in Finland. Their children were Kasper, Arvid, Erik, Ellida, Ellen, Armas, Aino, Hilja and Sigrid.
Armas, Arvid and Erik were famous Finnish cultural figures.
Daughter Aino Järnefelt was married to composer Jean Sibelius. Her marriage was not a happy one.
lieutenant is possible that she had an affair with Johannes Brofeldt (also called Juhani Aho) in the 1880s, but never confirmed. Elisabeth Järnefelt became a central figure of Finnish culture as the host of a literary salon in Helsinki, referred to as ”Järnefelts skola” (Järnefelt School), centered around Scandinavian, Finnish and Russian literature.
lieutenant was also the center of discussion of politics, religion and equality.
The ”Elisabeths krets” (Elisabeth Circle), as the salon was also called, is regarded as the starting point of the modern Finnish language realism and the first Finnish language writers. She was a follower of the Tolstoyan movement, likely the first in Finland. She closed her salon when her spouse moved to Vasa in the end of the 1880s.
She lived on the pension awarded by Tsarist Russia due to her late spouse being a Russian general, but lost it after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and spent her last years in reduced means.
When her sons was at university, her salon became a center of the Fennoman movement of Finnish nationalism, the association K.P.T. or ”koko programmi toimeen”, which worked to introduce the Finnish language in then Russian Finland, were the Swedish language was leading in the upper classes.