Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller - Softcover

Wullschläger, Jackie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014028320X ISBN 13: 9780140283204

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

Although before him Charles Perrault in France and the Brothers Gimm in Germany had collected and retold folk-tales in ways which found wide popular audiences, it was only with the appearance of Hans Christian Andersen's "Eventyr" (Fairy Tales) in 1835 that a writer emerged capable of creating new tales equal to those which existed in the folk memory. The grace and simplicity with which Andersen wrote, and his penetrating insight into the human condition, soon won him a wide following, and by the 1840s he was the most famous writer in Europe. Today, tales such as "The Ugly Ducking" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" are part of our inherited cultural consciousness, as familiar to us as any stories outside the Bible. Yet the saccharine picture we have of Andersen himself as a childlike storyteller is wholly at odds with what Jackie Wullschlager shows to be the true nature of his life. The outline is well known: the son of a dirt-poor cobbler and illiterate washerwoman who fought his way to fame and fortune. But Andersen was not at all what he seemed: wonderfully entertaining when he chose to be, he was also lonely, sexually confused and frustrated, vain yet anxious, manipulative yet vulnerable. "My name is gradually starting to shine, and that is the only thing I live for. I covet honour as a miser covets gold; both are said to be empty, but one has to have something to get excited about in this world, otherwise one would break down and rot," he wrote in 1837. Both the determination and the sadness in these sentences could be written over the whole of Andersen's life. Jackie Wullschlager's achievement is to show in detail how his art - much darker and more diverse than has been previously appreciated - emerged from this complex personality. Wullschlager is the first English biographer to return to original Danish sources and to have revisited the principal places where Andersen lived, and her sense of his landscapes - not only Golden Age Denmark but the princely courts

About this title

Review:

In 1867 Edmund Gosse called him "one of the most famous men alive in Europe"; he remains probably the only Dane from the 19th-century most people in this country would be able to name unprompted. The challenge for a biographer of a figure like Hans Christian Andersen--the pre-eminent storyteller of his age and perhaps of any age--is to make the narrative exciting. Given that the current vogue is for doorstop-thick biographies that move like sludge through an interminably detailed day-by-day account of the subject's life, it is very much to Jackie Wullschalger's credit that she never loses sight of the story. Andersen was a complex character and led a convoluted life, which brought him into touch with many of the leading European figures of his day. He stayed with Dickens--very much a fellow spirit, as Wullschlager argues--on visiting London. After he had gone Dickens pinned up a note in his house: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks--which seemed to the family AGES!". He could evidently be hard work; but many people loved him, and this biography explores the reasons why this was so. For all his gifts and likeability, Andersen emerges from this biography as often immature, and surprisingly prudish ("if it really is a sin," he agonised in his journal over being sexually attracted to women, "then let me fight it. I am still innocent, but my blood is burning. In my dreams I am boiling inside."). Wullschlager argues that it was Andersen's physical ugliness that alienated him from the sensual life: "long thin arms and legs out of all proportion, his feet of gigantic dimensions; his nose was so disproportionately large that it seemed to dominate his whole face, whereas his eyes were small and pale and well hidden in their sockets." A friend called him "the giraffe". Wullschlager is surely right to identify a sense of frustration, and a barely managed erotic repression in many of Andersen's greatest works. "The Ugly Duckling", "the Snow Queen", "the Little Mermaid" are all about outsiders, and all bear a direct relationship to Andersen's life. This book deftly picks out the contours of that life. --Adam Roberts

Review:

"In my view it is the best book ever written about Hans Christian Andersen. If someone had asked me a couple of months ago which biography of Andersen was the best I would immodestly have said my own work, but today I would answer that the best book is the one written by Jackie Wullschlager. Not only is is a fuller and more comprehensive biography, but it is the first book ever to place Andersen in a contemporary European tradition and to measure him with a European yardstick." Elias Bredsdorff, Emeritus Professor of Scandinavian Languages at Cambridge "[T]his spring, Knopf will publish a biography by Jackie Wullschlager, a writer for the London" Financial Times," which may add to the few reliable studies available in English, the most notable of which is Elias Bredsdorff's . . ." Diana and Jeffrey Frank, "The New Yorker" "Finely documented and insightful . . . Jackie Wullschlager's account . . . is a delight . . . her work gives off a classic sparkle. It will bring joy . . . "-George Steiner, "Observer" "Splendid . . . authoritative . . . gracefully written [and] meticulously referenced . . . will encourage many readers to revisit an author who undoubtedly deserves serious critical attention." -Christina Hardyment, "Financial Times" "Intensively researched and elegantly written."-Humphrey Carpenter, "Sunday Times " "Deals brilliantly with the whole man."-Melanie McDonagh, "Daily Telegraph" "Told with thoroughness and sympathy . . . [a life] as peculiar, fascinating and painful as any of his celebrated fairy tales."-Rosemary Ashton, "Sunday Telegraph" "An extraordinarily accomplished biography, both intellectually rigorous and emotionally wise . . . fascinating . . . Wullschlager wears her learning lightly but still we are left feeling we are in the hands of an expert guide."-Kathryn Hughes, "Literary Review""

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 014028320X
• ISBN 13: 9780140283204
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 552