# Is "Miss Julie (Fröken Julie)" by August Strindberg a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) by August Strindberg (Jos. Seligmanns Förlag, Stockholm, 1888) is identified by: The first edition title page reads 'Fröken Julie / Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel / af August Strindberg / Med ett förord af författaren / STOCKHOLM / JOS. The Swedish original is the true first: Stockholm, Jos.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- The first edition title page reads 'Fröken Julie / Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel / af August Strindberg / Med ett förord af författaren / STOCKHOLM / JOS. SELIGMANNS FÖRLAG' and is dated 1888; the author's preface promised on the title page is present
- It was issued in Stockholm in the week of 23–29 November 1888, ahead of the premiere
- Swedish drama of this period carries no printing statement and no number line, so identification rests on the Jos
- Seligmann imprint and the 1888 title-page date; the census's 'Josef Seligmann' should read Jos
- Seligmanns Förlag (the publisher Joseph Seligmann)
- The defining textual point is that this first edition prints a censored text: Seligmann required cuts and alterations before typesetting, later identified by scholars at roughly 330 places across the preface and dialogue and distinguishable in the manuscript by ink colour under infrared and stereomicroscopic analysis
- Publisher imprint reads Jos. Seligmanns Förlag, Stockholm

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | August Strindberg |
| Publisher | Jos. Seligmanns Förlag, Stockholm |
| Year | 1888 |
| True first | UK edition |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | The first edition title page reads 'Fröken Julie / Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel / af August Strindberg / Med ett förord af författaren /… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
The first edition title page reads 'Fröken Julie / Ett naturalistiskt sorgespel / af August Strindberg / Med ett förord af författaren / STOCKHOLM / JOS. SELIGMANNS FÖRLAG' and is dated 1888; the author's preface promised on the title page is present. It was issued in Stockholm in the week of 23–29 November 1888, ahead of the premiere. Swedish drama of this period carries no printing statement and no number line, so identification rests on the Jos. Seligmann imprint and the 1888 title-page date; the census's 'Josef Seligmann' should read Jos. Seligmanns Förlag (the publisher Joseph Seligmann). The defining textual point is that this first edition prints a censored text: Seligmann required cuts and alterations before typesetting, later identified by scholars at roughly 330 places across the preface and dialogue and distinguishable in the manuscript by ink colour under infrared and stereomicroscopic analysis. The 1888 first edition is therefore the earliest published text but not Strindberg's intended one — a point that should be stated on any copy, since it is the whole textual history of the play.

## Is this the true first?
The Swedish original is the true first: Stockholm, Jos. Seligmanns Förlag, 1888. Strindberg wrote in Swedish and no English edition is remotely contemporary, so there is no UK-vs-US question here; the first foreign appearance is the Danish translation by Nathalia Larsen, published in the week of 14–21 February 1889. English translations follow decades later and are never the first edition of the work — anything catalogued as a 'first edition' of Miss Julie in English is at most a first edition in English. A related first-thus trap: because the 1888 text was censored, the texts in general circulation descend from later restorations (the manuscript became accessible to scholars in 1936; Harry Bergholz attempted a reconstruction in 1954; Gunnar Ollén's 1984 edition is the closest to Strindberg's intended printer's text). Those restored texts are first-thus appearances of a reconstructed text, not editions of record.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
None documented. The trap in this author's market is the collected-edition reprint rather than a book club: John Landquist's text in vol. 23 of Strindberg's Samlade Skrifter (1914) was produced without access to the original manuscript, reprints the censored text, and is not an edition of record.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Miss Julie (Fröken Julie)* by August Strindberg a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/miss-julie-fr-ken-julie
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.