Sigtuna Humanities College

Sigtuna Humanities College is a school in Sigtuna whose significance in the novel rests on the histories attached to it: several women later connected through their school years, and a diary recalling two years of bullying and mental torment. The college thus represents both the promise of finding sympathetic peers and the persistence of a damaging past.

Identity and Setting

The novel refers to the institution as a college for the humanities and locates the boarding-school experience in Sigtuna. The evidence does not describe its administration, curriculum, or wider institutional structure; its significance emerges instead through the experiences and connections of those who attended.

Attendance and Shared History

Charlotte Silfverberg, Fredrika Grünewald, Henrietta Dürer, Annette Lundström, and Victoria Bergman are identified as schoolmates there. Their shared attendance gives the institution a connective role: a common past links women whose names later enter the investigation. When Jeanette Kihlberg considers the former classmates, that school history becomes part of the pattern she is tracing.

Torment and the Promise of Belonging

Victoria Bergman’s diary entries describe two years of bullying and mental torment at boarding school in Sigtuna. Revenge and retribution recur in the entries, which also record her dream of returning one day and blowing up the whole school. The remembered school is therefore not a neutral backdrop: it is tied to an unresolved desire for retaliation, even as the novel distinguishes Victoria from the later deaths of two people mentioned in the diary.

A separate account looks toward an autumn start at school in Sigtuna with hope. A girl expects to find friends who are like her and will understand, and believes that Viggo Dürer has helped make this move possible. Set against the diary’s account of torment, that expectation gives the school a second, sharply contrasting meaning: the hope of belonging does not erase the harm associated with its past.