Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller Book

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 RobertsRead More