published (Some Thoughts about How Reactions Begin), which marked her a social radical, which she would never deny. Changing views Key grew up in an atmosphere of liberalism, and throughout the 1870s her political beliefs were radically liberal. She was republican-minded, with the idea of freedom holding vast importance for her. As the 1880s advanced, her thinking became even more radical, affecting first her religious beliefs and then her views on life in society in general. This was the outcome of extensive reading. During the latter part of the 1880s and particularly in the 1890s, she began to read socialist literature and turned increasingly towards socialism. Key was raised in a rigid Christian household, but while growing up she started questioning her views. From 1879 she studied Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley. In the autumn of that year she met both Huxley and Haeckel, the German biologist and philosopher, in London. The principle of evolution, in which Key had come to believe, was also to have an influence on her educational views. She is quoted as having said: "Side by side with the class war, the culture war must ceaselessly be waged by the young and among the young upon whom rests the responsibility of making the new society better for all than the old could be." Later life In the late 1880s–early 1890s, Key decided to write biographies of women who had prominent roles in Swedish intellectual life; they were: Victoria Benedictsson, Anne Charlotte Leffler, and Sonia Kovalevsky. She would also write about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. The Cambridge Chronicle of Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 19, 1912 noted that in The Atlantic Monthly, Ellen Key, the Swedish writer, who has had such immense influence over the woman movement throughout Europe, makes her first appearance in an American periodical with her article on "Motherliness". The Woman Movement by Key was published in Swedish in 1909, and in an English translation in 1912 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. After she retired from teaching, she met and helped the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She was later painted by Hanna Pauli. Die Antifeministen (The Antifeminists, 1902) by Hedwig Dohm cited both Key and Lou Andreas-Salomé as anti-feminists. She died on 25 April 1926 at the age of seventy-six. Selected works Key started her career as a writer in the mid-1870s with literary essays. She