Cora Sandel

Sara Cecilie Görvell Fabricius, writing under the pseudonym Cora Sandel, was born on December 20, 1880, in Christiania and grew up in Tromsø above the Arctic Circle. She spent fifteen pivotal years in Paris studying painting at Christian Krohg's academy before turning to prose fiction.

Sandel achieved immense critical and popular success with Alberte og Jakob (1926), the opening volume of her masterpiece trilogy featuring the introspective, artistically inclined Alberta. Followed by Alberte og friheten (1931) and Bare Alberte (1939), the trilogy offers an intimate and psychologically precise depiction of a young woman's struggle against provincial expectations and economic precarity in Montparnasse.