Margareta Bergman


Margareta Bergman was a Swedish novelist.

Life and career

Margareta Bergman, only sister of film director Ingmar Bergman, is the author of novels Karin and Mirror Mirror.
As a child of 8, she helped to inspire her brother Ingmar Bergman to create his first plays at home in 1930. Her older brother Dag Bergman was an ambassador.
Her father Erik Bergman, a Lutheran priest, was extremely strict, and forced Margareta and her brothers to attend all of his Sunday church services.
Ingmar Bergman's most personal feature film, that he had intended to be his last, was the somewhat autobiographical Fanny and Alexander, based on his and Margareta's unhappy childhood.
Margareta Bergman was married to English author and broadcaster Paul Britten Austin from 1951 until his death in 2005. She had four children, Veronica Ralston, Thomas Britten Austin, Rose Britten Austin, and Cecelia Britten Austin.

Reception

Publisher's Weekly wrote that in Mirror, Mirror, Bergman draws on a similar set of images as her brother Ingmar Bergman— wild strawberries, an "actress struck mute by aphasia" but with a "more delicate and muted result." The review concludes "Bergman's prose carefully circles, rather than describes, the unspeakable, resulting in an austere work of art softened by a uniquely modern wisdom."

Novels available in English translation