Release date is 2026-05-17

Juhani Kärkkäinen and Johanna Kankaanpää

Yhteiskunnan uhri by Anna Mathilda Cecilia Johannesdotter Johansson is an autobiographical confession and social document, framed by an editor’s preface and written around the turn of the 20th century. It is not a novel but a first‑person testimony that indicts the social order while tracing a “fallen” woman’s life through poverty, prostitution, police control, illness, and a troubled search for faith and dignity.

The narrator writes from prison, beginning on a Christmas Eve, and looks back to a strict yet loving childhood with her grandmother, early domestic service, exhaustion, and loneliness. Moving from rural places to Norrköping and then Stockholm, she encounters predatory employers and a seducer, slips into restaurant work and brothels, becomes registered and hospitalized, and briefly basks in finery and flattery before a long cycle of arrests, fines, sickness, surgery, violence, and police harassment. She twice attempts suicide, passes through a rescue home, and wavers between repentance and relapse, haunted by dreams and biblical phrases while condemning a system that protects “respectable” society by sacrificing women and rarely punishing men. Each attempt at honest work is thwarted by poverty, missing clothes, and exploitation by madams and “friends.” The account closes with another sentence ahead, a bleak Christmas without visitors, and the admission that relentless hardship is hardening her heart. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Pori: Roneliuksen kirjakauppa, 1907