The chapter centres on a comparative study of the international reception of two Swedish women writers, the Romantic poet, Julia Nyberg, and the best-selling novelist, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, using their examples to highlight the different opportunities for disrupting the balance between small and major, and presenting gender, genre and nationality as key factors in the process of attaining an international readership for not only Swedish, but also writers from other small nations. The chapter concludes by arguing that both writers had the potential to enter the international literary mainstream, but through reception and promotion were progressively removed from the centre into an increasingly gendered context, the ladies’ room in the peripheral history of Swedish literature.