Background
She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag.
She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag.
Her brother was noted mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Leffler was initially educated privately and then a student at the Wallinska skolan from the age of thirteen, at that time perhaps the most progressive school open to females in Stockholm. Her first volume of stories appeared in 1869, but the first to which she attached her name was Ur lifvet ("From Life," 1882), a series of realistic sketches of the upper circles of Swedish society, followed, by three other collections with the same title.
Her earliest plays, Skådespelerskan ("The Actress," 1873), and its successors, were produced anonymously in Stockholm, but in 1883 her reputation was established by the success of Sanna qvinnor ("True Women") and En räddande engel ("An Angel of Deliverance").
Sanna Kvinnor is directed against false femininity, and was well received in Germany as well as in Sweden. She spent some time in England, and in 1885 produced her Hur man gör gott ("How one does good"), followed in 1888 by Kampen för lyckan ("The Struggle for Happiness"), with which she was helped by Sofia Kovalevskaya.
An English translation (1895) by Annie de Furuhjelm and A. M. Clive Bayley contains a biographical note on Fräu Edgren-Leffler by Lily Wolffsohn, based on private sources. Leffler died in 1892 of complications from appendicitis in Naples, Italy.