The Impact of Hans Christian Andersen on Victorian Fiction

 

Hans Christian Andersen

The Impact of Hans Christian Andersen on Victorian Fiction

Hans Christian Andersen / Bedtime stories

Jacqueline Banerjee

[This is the third of three edited and updated excerpts from an essay entitled "Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians," which appeared in translation in Literature, Culture and History in Victorian England: A Festschrift for Professor Matsumura (Tokyo: Eiho-sha, 1999. 68-89).]

Of Hans Christian Andersen's two hundred and more short pieces, less than twenty appeared in volumes subtitled "Told for Children," and these volumes were the first few, published when the young and impecunious Danish author was desperate for a share of the market (see De Mylius, 168-69). His dedications to Dickens soon confirmed that he had no intention of limiting his audience to children. In the event, many other eminent Victorians besides Thackeray were greatly taken with his work. Not all were put off, as Dickens eventually was, by his personal gaucheness and egotism. Indeed, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poem, inspired by Andersen's visit to Italy in 1861, extols him not only as a "seer" with "a poet's tongue," but also as "a man of men" ("The North and the South"). Consequently, Andersen as well as the Grimms had a pervasive and profound effect on Victorian fiction throughout the period. Fairy tales were written even by major figures like Ruskin ("The King of the Golden River") and even the major novels "are moulded by fairy-tale themes and structures" (Wullschläger 101). Like the drenched girl who knocks on the city gate in a storm at the beginning of Andersen's "The Princess and the Pea," the plainly dressed Jane Eyre wins the hero by her extraordinary sensitivity; like the ungainly chick in "The Ugly Duckling," Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is one of many plain or tomboyish young heroines who turn into beauties. And even though successive Victorian translators sought to push his tales further and further into the nursery, one of the writers most directly influenced by Andersen was working at the very end of the period. This was Oscar Wilde, whose own fairy tales play more elaborately, sometimes less successfully, but always intriguingly on ideas, themes and motifs introduced by the Danish author.

How guest Hans Christian Andersen destroyed his friendship with Dickens

 

Hans Christian Andersen

How guest Hans Christian Andersen destroyed his friendship with Dickens

This article is more than 8 years old

The Danish writer’s behaviour on an extended visit killed the authors’ friendship, letters show

Hans Christian Andersen / Bedtime stories

Vanessa Thorpe

Sunday 10 September 2017

It was not, to say the least, a successful visit. The burgeoning friendship between a pair of literary stars, Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, had looked set to last. But it could not survive an overlong stay by the Danish author at the British novelist’s family home in Kent. Just how bad things became, on one side at least, has been revealed by a surprisingly frank letter sold at auction on Saturday.

Hans Christian Andersen

Sprung From Poverty, the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen Endure

Hans Christian Andersen / Bedtime stories

2016-08-04T07:55:06-04:00August 4, 2016

Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales endure more than a century after his death on this day in 1875, had a childhood as difficult as those of his plucky protagonists.

Hans Christian Andersen / The Elf of the Rose

 

Illustration by Veronica Dye Johnson

THE ELF OF THE ROSE

A fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen

In the midst of a garden grew a rose-tree, in full blossom, and in the prettiest of all the roses lived an elf. He was such a little wee thing, that no human eye could see him. Behind each leaf of the rose he had a sleeping chamber. He was as well formed and as beautiful as a little child could be, and had wings that reached from his shoulders to his feet. Oh, what sweet fragrance there was in his chambers! and how clean and beautiful were the walls! for they were the blushing leaves of the rose.

Hans Christian Andersen / The Storks

THE STORKS

The Old God is Still Alive)

A fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen / Las cigüeñas

In the last house in a little village the storks had built a nest, and the mother stork sat in it with her four young ones, who stretched out their necks and pointed their black beaks, which had not yet turned red like those of the parent birds. A little way off, on the edge of the roof, stood the father stork, quite upright and stiff; not liking to be quite idle, he drew up one leg, and stood on the other, so still that it seemed almost as if he were carved in wood. “It must look very grand,” thought he, “for my wife to have a sentry guarding her nest. They do not know that I am her husband; they will think I have been commanded to stand here, which is quite aristocratic;” and so he continued standing on one leg.

Hans Christian Andersen / The Flying Trunk

THE FLYING

TRUNK 

(The Old God is Still Alive)

A fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen / El cofre volador

Here was once a merchant who was so rich that he could have paved the whole street with gold, and would even then have had enough for a small alley. But he did not do so; he knew the value of money better than to use it in this way. So clever was he, that every shilling he put out brought him a crown; and so he continued till he died. His son inherited his wealth, and he lived a merry life with it; he went to a masquerade every night, made kites out of five pound notes, and threw pieces of gold into the sea instead of stones, making ducks and drakes of them. In this manner he soon lost all his money. At last he had nothing left but a pair of slippers, an old dressing-gown, and four shillings. And now all his friends deserted him, they could not walk with him in the streets; but one of them, who was very good-natured, sent him an old trunk with this message, “Pack up!” “Yes,” he said, “it is all very well to say ‘pack up,’” but he had nothing left to pack up, therefore he seated himself in the trunk. It was a very wonderful trunk; no sooner did any one press on the lock than the trunk could fly. He shut the lid and pressed the lock, when away flew the trunk up the chimney with the merchant’s son in it, right up into the clouds. Whenever the bottom of the trunk cracked, he was in a great fright, for if the trunk fell to pieces he would have made a tremendous somerset over the trees. However, he got safely in his trunk to the land of Turkey. He hid the trunk in the wood under some dry leaves, and then went into the town: he could so this very well, for the Turks always go about dressed in dressing-gowns and slippers, as he was himself. He happened to meet a nurse with a little child. “I say, you Turkish nurse,” cried he, “what castle is that near the town, with the windows placed so high?”

Two Women By Tove Ditlevsen

Two Women on a Wharf, 1949
by Willem de Kooning

 

Two Women 

by Tove Ditlevsen

W

hen Britta was depressed, nervous, and restless like this, so not even a complete reorganization of all the furniture in the house, or the preparation of a complicated dinner, could help her, there were only two things that could alleviate her suffering: a visit to either the beauty parlor or the doctor. Sometimes both. The beauty parlor first, of course.

 

Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3

Description

The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen's autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian).

 Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth century writers

 

Youth: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 2

Description

The acclaimed Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen's autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian) continues with Youth. Following Childhood, this second volume finds the young author consumed in trials by fire that only fuel her relentless passion for artistic freedom--placing her on a devastating and destructive path recounted in the final volume, Dependency.

Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a checkered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady, and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation--until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.

 

Childhood: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 1

Description

The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing--and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency

Tove knows she is a misfit whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For long, mysterious words begin to crawl across her soul, and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her--and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.

 

Facing demons … Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup

FICTION IN TRANSLATION

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review – confessions of a literary outsider

The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency

Liz Jensen
Wed 16 Oct 2019 09.00 BST

F

or the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war. While always the central protagonist in her dispatches from the frontline of her own life, she never pretended to be the heroine. Which makes it unsurprising that in an era with an appetite for autofiction, her mordant, vibrantly confessional autobiographical work should be experiencing a revival.

Tove Ditlevsen / A Danish Genius of Madness

 

Re-Covered: A Danish 

Genius of Madness

 In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

Lucy Scholes

December 9, 2020

It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen. This was in spring 2018, when I was commissioning features for the first issue of The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women, the rare books catalogue–cum–literary magazine of which I’m the managing editor. “She is loved by generations of women and put down by generations of men,” Nors wrote in an email. “She was also nuts and quite extraordinary in her personal life. Many men, drug addictions, often submitted to mental institutions, and LOVED by women readers. I mean: LOVED!”

FSG’S FORTHCOMING EDITION OF THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY.

This was more than enough to intrigue me, but Nors’s finished piece, “The Suicide of Tove Ditlevsen,” only left me all the more fascinated. In it, Nors describes Ditlevsen—who was born in Vesterbro, a working-class district in Copenhagen, in 1917, and killed herself at age fifty-eight in 1976, after many years battling depression and addiction—as “the Billie Holiday of poetry, accessible, complex, and simple all at the same time. There’s a special mournful sweetness in the earlier poems that belongs to the girlish. Later, her prose turned the dreams and disappointments of life as a woman inside out.”

Tove Ditlevsen / New Translation Shares The Voice Of A Poet Who Wrote As Intensely As She Lived

 

Tove Ditlevsen

New Translation Shares The Voice Of A Poet Who Wrote As Intensely As She Lived

John Powers
February 3, 2021

We're living in a golden age for women's writing. The wheels of literary justice are finally giving due process to great women writers whose work has been forgotten, ignored or insufficiently appreciated.

Tove Ditlevsen / The Labyrinth of Memory

 

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen

THE LABYRINTH OF MEMORY

Lise Busk-Jensen 

20 January 2012

ARTICLE SUMMARY

In 1937 Tove Ditlevsen first had a poem published. The poem can be read as an allegory of her writing career, which was to produce one of the most significant bodies of work written by a woman in the Danish post-war period. Underneath the extremely simple surface, the poem anticipates recurring themes such as female identity, memory, and creativity. Loss of childhood, and especially of the symbiotic relationship to the mother, is the foundation of Tove Ditlevsen’s melancholy poetics.Her writing is one long memory process, first in the form of fiction, but gradually also in essays with an autobiographical reference point and in essayistic fragments of memory, until she published her autobiographical works proper. Once the autobiographical material had been exhausted and all the key characters in her childhood universe – her mother, her father, and her brother – were dead and her husband had left her, Tove Ditlevsen ended her life as she had presaged.

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) wrote poems from the age of ten; in 1937 she managed to get one of them published in Vild Hvede (Wild Wheat), a journal for young writers and artists. The title of the poem is “Til mit døde Barn” (To My Dead Child), the form is traditional, eight four-line stanzas with end-rhyme, but the content is striking: a mother talking to her dead baby boy as she lays him in the coffin.

Translating Tove Ditlevsen / ‘It Is Not the Voice of Someone Who Is Suffering’

 

Tove Ditlevsen

Translating Tove Ditlevsen: ‘It Is Not the Voice of Someone Who Is Suffering’

Michael Favala Goldman in Conversation with Catherine Lacey on Well-Versed

By Well Versed
March 26, 2021

On this week’s episode of Well-Versed, FSG author Catherine Lacey talks withMichael Favala Goldman about translatingTove Ditlevsen’s Dependency.

From the episode:

Catherine Lacey: I have a question about the way that Tove Ditlevsen is a household name in Denmark, and yet we weren’t really aware of her here. How is she thought of in Denmark beyond just being obviously celebrated as a genius writer and an important Danish writer? Is she also thought of as a tragic figure?

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen / A masterpiece

 

THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY: CHILDHOOD; YOUTH; DEPENDENCY

"A masterpiece"

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Description

---

Called “a masterpiece” by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Tove Ditlevsen / Toeing the Trap

Tove Ditlevsen on her childhood street in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, circa 1950

 

Toeing the Trap

February 10, 2021   •   By Hannah Kofman

The 10 Best Books of 2021

The Copenhagen Trilogy

TOVE DITLEVSEN

TOVE DITLEVSEN’S first novel, A Child was Harmed, was sent back from the publisher with the accusation that she had “been reading too much Freud.” But Ditlevsen says she didn’t know who Freud was, a declaration that, 200-plus pages into her three-part memoir — a clear-eyed exploration of the lifelong echoes of a traumatic childhood — seems just as unlikely coming from her as it would from Elena Ferrante or Jamaica Kincaid. Then again, maybe it’s true. Ditlevsen was born near the end of World War I, when Freud’s cultural hegemony was not yet guaranteed. She wasn’t a particularly voracious reader, and Denmark is pretty north of Austria. Surely memoir doesn’t lie.

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

The Danish memoirist built a literature of disaster, brick by brick.

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Hilton Als

February 8, 2021

Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists—the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus—Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. Her world—the world she describes in “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Dependency,” the three short books that make up the trilogy—was cash poor, emotionally mean, and misogynist. The sun must have shone sometimes in Denmark before and during the Second World War, but the atmosphere in “The Copenhagen Trilogy” is damp, dark, and flowerless. It’s not so surprising, then, that one of the first works Ditlevsen published, as a teen-ager, was a poem titled “To My Dead Child”: 

I never heard your little voice.
Your pale lips never smiled at me.
And the kick of your tiny feet
Is something I will never see. . . .
See how I kiss your icy hand,
happy to be with you yet awhile,
silently I kiss you, weeping not,—
though the tears are burning in my throat.