Born in Värmaland (Varmland), Sweden, Selma Lagerlöf grew up on the small estate of Mårbacka, owned by her paternal grandmother Elisabet Maria Wennervik, who had inherited it from her mother. Charmed by her grandmother's stories, reading widely,
- and educated by governesses,
Selma Lagerlöf was motivated to become a writer. She wrote some poems and a play.
Financial reversals
and her father's drinking,
plus her own lameness from a childhood incident where she'd lost use of her legs for two years,
led to her becomind depressed.

The writer Anna Frysell took her under her wing, helping Selma decide to take a loan to finance her formal education.

After a year of preparatory school Selma Lagerlöf entered the Women's Higher Teacher Training College in Stockholm. She graduated three years later, in 1885.

At school, Selma Lagerlöf read many of the nineteenth century's important writers -- Henry Spencer, Theodore Parker, and Charles Darwin among them -- and questioned the faith of her childhood, developing a faith in the goodness and morality of God but largely giving up traditional Christian dogmatic beliefs.

The same year that she graduated, her father died, and Selma Lagerlöf moved to the town of Landskrona to live with her mother and aunt and to begin teaching. She also began writing in her spare time.
By 1890, and encouraged by Sophie Adler Sparre, Selma Lagerlöf published a few chapters of Gösta Berlings Saga in a journal, winning a prize that enabled her to leave her teaching position to finish the novel, with its themes of beauty versus duty and joy versus good. The novel was published the next year, to disappointing reviews by the major critics. But its reception in Denmark encouraged her to continue with her writing.

Selma Lagerlöf then wrote Osynliga länkar (Invisible Links), a collection including stories about medieval Scandinavia as well as some with modern settings.

The same year, 1894, that her second book was published, Selma Lagerlöf met Sophie Elkan, also a writer, who became her friend and companion, and, judging from the letters between them that survive, with shom she fell deeply in love. Over many years, Elkan and Lagerlöf critiqued each others' work. Lagerlöf wrote to others of Elkan's strong influence on her work, often disagreeing sharply with the direction Lagerlöf wanted to take in her books. Elkan seems to have become jealous of Lagerlöf's success later.

By 1895, Selma Lagerlöf gave up her teaching completely to devote herself to her writing. She and Elkan, with the help of proceeds from Gösta Berlings Saga and a scholarship and grant, traveled to Italy. There, a legend of a Christ Child figure that had been replaced with a false version inspired Lagerlöf's next novel, Antikrists mirakler, where she explored the interplay between Christian and socialist moral systems.
Selma Lagerlöf moved in 1897 to Falun, and there met Valborg Olander, who became her literary assistant, friend, and associate. Elkan's jealousy of Olander was a complication in the relationship. Olander, a teacher, was also active in the growing woman suffrage movement in Sweden.

Selma Lagerlöf continued to write, especially on medieval supernatural and religious themes. Her two part novel Jerusalem brought more public acclaim. Her stories published as Kristerlegender (Christ Legends) were received favorably both by those whose faith was rooted firmly in the Bible and by those who read the Bible stories as myth or legend.
In 1904, Lagerlöf and Elkan toured Sweden extensively as Selma Lagerlöf began work on an unusual textbook: a Swedish geography and history book for children, told as a legend of a naughty boy whose travels on the back of a goose help him become more responsible. Published as Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Voyage of Nils Holgersson), this text came to be used in many Swedish schools. Some criticism for scientific inaccuracies inspired revisions of the book.