Gösta Berling is a defrocked Lutheran priest who has been saved by the Mistress of Ekeby from freezing to death on the snowy shores of Lake Fryken (Lake Löven in the story) in Värmland and thereupon becomes one of her pensioners in the manor at Ekeby, where the storyline of the novel begins to unfold and is later on filled with many wild adventures. Using wolves, snow, supernatural elements and eccentric upper-class characters to project an exotic image of 1820s Värmland, the novel can be compared to magic realism.
