Böcker av Amalie Skram

"Udvalgte Fortællinger" utkom i 1909 og er en samling med Amalie Skrams mest kjente noveller for både voksne og barn, skrevet i tiden mellom 1883 og 1899. Boken inneholder "Bøn og Anfægtelse", "Knut Tandberg", "Madam Højers Lejefolk", "Karens Jul", "In Asiam profectus est", "Sommer": "Sommer", "Memento mori", "Glæde", "Post festum", "Det røde Gardin", "En Rose", "Børnefortællinger": "I det asowske Hav", "Det blaa Atlaskes Baand og den røde Dukke Silke", "Første Aften", "Anden Aften", "Tredie Aften", "Paa Hondurasfloden", "Majkaland".

Fru Ines is a city novel, vividly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century Constantinople. The city is a hub, a meeting point of East and West, where privileged Europeans enjoy a cossetted existence screened from the tumult and misery of the streets. One of the privileged is Ines, a Spanish Levantine from Alexandria, whose marriage to a Swedish consul has brought her a life of enviable luxury; but behind the polished facade she is lonely and unfulfilled, trapped in a loveless marriage. Her yearning for passion leads her to embark on an affair with a naive young Swede, Arthur Flemming; but their love is threatened from the start by portents of disaster and the threat of discovery, and Ines is inexorably drawn to seek rescue from the sordid dealers from whom she had been so careful to keep aloof.

This novel tells the story of the misalliance between Lucie, a vivacious and beautiful dancing girl from Tivoli, and Theodor Gerner, a respectable lawyer from the strait-laced middle society of nineteenth-century Norway. Having first kept her as a mistress, Gerner is so captivated by Lucie´s charms that he marries her, only to discover that his project to turn her into a proper and demure housewife is continually frustrated by her irrepressible sensuality and lack of fine breeding. What had made her alluring as a mistress makes her unacceptable as a wife. His attempts to govern her behaviour develop gradually into a harsh tyranny against which she rebels in a manner which brings misery and despair to both.

With high hopes, Captain Riber embarks with his young bride Aurora on a voyage to exotic destinations. But they are an ill-matched pair; her naive illusions are shattered by the realities of married life, whilst his hopes of domestic bliss are frustrated by his wife's unhappiness.