Florence Stephens

Florence Elisabet Stephens (5 October 1881 – 2 April 1979) was a wealthy Swedish landowner, known as Fröken på Huseby ("the Lady of Huseby") for her estate at Huseby. She was the main figure in the Huseby Affair (Swedish: Husebyskandalen, "Huseby scandal"), one of the most prominent court cases in Sweden during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Life

Born in Skatelöv, Kronoberg County, Florence Stephens was the eldest of three daughters of the landowner and politician Joseph Stephens (1841–1934) by his marriage to Elisabeth Kreüger; her paternal grandfather, George Stephens (1813–1895), was an English academic, originally from Liverpool.

Stephens and her sisters Mary and Maggie were educated by a governess, and although she had a good education in languages and was well read, she had no formal education in management or economics. She never married; she ran the household after her mother's death in 1911 and acted as her father's assistant and representative for three decades, and in the 1920s and 1930s was also active in local politics, including a woman's association.

When her father died in 1934 and she inherited the estate at Huseby, she doubled her land holdings by acquiring additional timberland, and then in the 1940s, at times in partnership with Prince Carl Bernadotte, nephew of King Gustav V, she also expanded the estate's industry, which included an iron foundry. She financed both by cutting timber, both on the original estate and on newly acquired land. In the early 1950s, the forestry commission ordered her to stop cutting, which interrupted this source of funding. She was also averse to many modern farming methods, including chemical fertilisers and weed killers and the use of tractors instead of horses. In addition, she chose her advisors and agents poorly, and some took advantage of her.