Getting Married I was written in 1884, when Strindberg was

thirty-five.-He was already the author of a considerable body of

work, plays, prose, and poetry, much of it heartily disliked by

many of his fellow-countrymen. To escape from their recrimina-

tions he had taken refuge in Switzerland, where he was living

with his wife and family at Ouchy, near Lausanne. He and his

wife, Siri yon Essen, had been more or less happy together for

seven years, and had three children, two girls and a baby boy. Siri

had been married before, but had left her first husband, Baron

Wrangel, and married Strindberg partly because she hoped that

through him she would be able to achieve her ambition to become

an actress, a profession impossible for the wife of an officer. Her

hopes had only been partially realized, as her talent was small, and

while Strindberg was happy and contented in Switzerland, Siri

was longing to return to Sweden to continue her career.

Strindberg wrote Getting Married I (that is the preface, the

interview, and twelve stories) at breakneck speed between z 5 May

and 4 July. While working on it he was in a state of creative frenzy.

"I m writing like a sleep-walker, and must not be awakened, for

then I might come to a standstill in the middle of it", he wrote to

Karl Otto Bonnier, his publisher s son, on iz June (B. IV, p. 21o).

This does not mean that the stories were a new idea. Strindberg

had been planning them for several years, and may even have done

some preparatory work on them. In his letters of 188o-81 he

several times mentions a prospective work which may have been

the germ of Getting Married L But other things intervened, and in

i88z he was fully occupied with no less than five works, includ-

ing The New State (Det Nya Riket, SS. io), and The Swedish

People (Svens/ea folke

trouble.

S. 7-8), both of which got him into