Maria Kristina Kiellström

Maria Kristina Kiellström (15 June 1744 – 20 January 1798), known as Maja Stina, was a Swedish silk worker and alleged prostitute, and most famously the fictional demimonde prostitute or Rococo "nymph" Ulla Winblad in the songs called Fredman's Epistles by Sweden's troubadour, Carl Michael Bellman, who made her a major character in his work.

Biography Kiellström was born into a poor family in what was then the poor area of Ladugårdslandet in Stockholm. Her mother died when she was five years old. Her father, Johan Kiellström, was originally in the artillery, but he was forced to resign from the military because of epilepsy, and supported himself as a street sweeper. Her father remarried a woman by the name Catharina Elisabeth Winblad, and Maja Stina occasionally used her stepmother's name Winblad ("vineleaf"). Bellman himself had a sinecure job in the customs service. The marriage was unhappy as Nordström treated her badly. She became a widow in 1781, when she moved back to Stockholm, and in 1786, in her middle forties, she married Erik Lindståhl, a man eleven years her junior. She was at this time described as a very well preserved beauty.

Ulla! min Ulla! Säj får jag dig bjuda rödaste smultron i mjölk och vin...

Ulla, my Ulla, say may I thee offer reddest strawberries in milk and wine...

It is said that both Kiellström and her husband felt persecuted by Bellman's portrayal of her, and she was exposed to much humiliation because of his songs involving her alter ego. Indeed, another woman who simply had the Christian name "Ulla" found her Stockholm newspaper advertisement ineffective in the 1790s, as her unhappy suitor replied "How can you expect me to marry you when you have such a name?"