Books September 2001
Gulliver among swans
A review of Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller by Jackie Wullschlager.
More than a hundred years after his death, Hans Christian Andersen can still lay claim to being a world-famous writer, but the world he’s famous in is the Lilliputian one of the nursery. The title of a publication from the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs aims to tell us all that non-Danes need to know: Hans Christian Andersen (1805–74): The Writer Everybody Reads and Loves, and Nobody Knows: The Real-Life Fairy Tale of the Shoemaker’s Son from Odense who Conquered the World with His Magical Stories. Andersen would have liked this title, with its puff of magical transformation. He called one of his own works on the subject The Fairy Tale of My Life, and he certainly wanted everyone to think it was one: “Twenty-five years ago, I arrived with my small parcel in Copenhagen, a poor stranger of a boy, and today I have drunk my chocolate with the Queen, sitting opposite her and the King at the table.”
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