Ellen Key - Selected Works

Selected Works

Ellen Key started her career as a writer in the mid-1870s with literary essays. She became known to a large public through the pamphlet On Freedom of Speech and Publishing (1889). Her name and her books then became the topic of lively discussions. The following work focuses on her views on education, personal freedom, and the independent development of the individual. These works include:

• Individualism and Socialism (1896)
• Images of Thought (1898)
• Human-beings (1899)
• Lifelines, volumes I-III (1903–06)
• Neutrality of the Souls (1916).

On education, her earliest article may be Teachers for Infants at Home and in School in Tidskrift för hemmet (1876). Her first more widely read essay, Books versus Coursebooks, was published in the journal Verdandi (1884). Later, in the same journal, she published other articles A Statement on Co-Education (1888) and Murdering the Soul in Schools (1891). Later she published the works Education (1897) and Beauty for All (1899).

In 1906 came Popular Education with Special Consideration for the Development of Aesthetic Sense. In the last books Key views aesthetics, as beauty and art, from the aspect of the elevation of humanity.

Several of Key's writings were translated into English by Mamah Borthwick, during the period of her affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Among her best-known works published in English:

• The Morality of Woman (1911)
• Love and Marriage (1911, repr. with critical and biographical notes by Havelock Ellis, 1931)
• The Century of the Child (1909)
• The Woman Movement (1912)
• The Younger Generation (1914)
• War, Peace, and the Future (1916).