ABSTRACT
Childhood autobiography is quite a new genre even though it has become extremely popular during the last decades. Before the era of Romanticism, autobiographers gave only little attention to childhood, Augustine's Confession being an exception. This chapter focuses on psychological subjectivity, the inner life, the construction of human interiority and its relationship to childhood. Fredrika Lovisa Lindqvist was one of the early Finnish women writers and in her own cultural context a true pioneer in writing autobiography. She might be called 'a child of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism' found in the remote fringes of Europe in the cities of Turku and Stockholm. Fredrika Runeberg was twenty years a junior to Fredrika Lindqvist and similarly to her spent her years of childhood and youth in the city of Turku. Her autobiography, Min pennas saga, narrates a story of an artist, but it paints a very different childhood landscape than that of Lindqvist and its happiness, naturalness and harmony of childhood.
