The Revolutionary Drama of Minna Canth      

‘Your laws and justice – that’s what I meant to shoot!’: The Revolutionary Drama of Minna Canth

Friday 21 February 2025, 10.30am – 12pm GMT 

Online and in person: Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building 

If you prefer to join us online, please sign up for the Zoom link and our mailing list by contacting us at scandinavianstudies@torch.ox.ac.uk

The TORCH Scandinavian Studies Network is pleased to present the second lecture of its Hilary Term Lecture Series. 

Dr Minna Jeffery is a Junior Research Fellow in Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her research centres around theatre translation, women’s playwriting, queer and feminist theatre, and Finnish theatre. She completed her PhD by practice as research at the University of Kent in 2023, where her doctoral research proposed and examined strategies for feminist theatre translation through translating Minna Canth’sThe Worker’s Wife (1885) from Finnish to English. In addition to her research and translation work, Minna is a theatre-maker producing work with her company Good Friends for a Lifetime.

This lecture introduces Minna Canth (1844-1897), one of Finland’s most acclaimed writers and dramatists, celebrated in particular for her contributions to the women’s rights movement. The lecture will focus on three of Canth’s most politically radical plays, The Worker’s Wife [Työmiehen vaimo] (1885), Children of Misfortune [Kovan onnen lapsia] (1888), and Anna Liisa (1895). Between them, these plays address misogynistic property laws, workers’ revolution, infanticide, and more, and were pioneering both formally and politically, espousing a feminist-realist dramaturgy and feminist-socialist politics unique in Canth’s context.