Paperback: The dress was loose everywhere except in the sleeves and he felt warm and submerged, as if dipping into a summer sea. The fox was chasing the mouse, and there was a distant voice in his head: the soft cry of a scared little girl.
Copenhagen, 1925, the studio of American painter Greta Waud, anxious to put the finishing touches to her latest portrait but her diva subject has cancelled yet another sitting; how is Greta ever going to get it done?
A sudden glint in her eye and she calls to her husband Einar.
And so, late on an April afternoon, in a hush of breath and a whisper of white silk, beautiful but tremulous, the Danish Girl or better known as Lili Elbe, is born.
With her comes a terrible confusion of tortured feelings, of guilty longings and searing fears and the most ecstatic passion, the most tender love that either has ever known.
David Ebershoff's extraordinary debut novel is actually based on a true story of Einar Mogens Wegener, a successful artist, and his wife. In early 1931 Copenhagen, when the news broke that a man had changed his gender, newspapers around the world ran accounts of Einar Wegener's remarkable life and his successful gender reassignment surgery. However, Ebershoff's The Danish Girl is entirely fictional and does not contain biographical details of Einar Wegener's life.
To read about the real Einar Wegener, check out Man Into Woman: The First Sex Change (1933) edited by Ernst Ludwig Harthern-Jacobsen using the pseudonym Niels Hoyer (ISBN 0-9547072-0-6 at www.blueboatbooks.co.uk) or Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft by Dr. Rainer Herrn (2005), ISBN 3-89806-463-8 - German study containing a detailed account of the operations of Lili Elbe, their preparations and the role of Magnus Hirschfeld (sexologist from Berlin).
About the author: David Ebershoff is the author of four books of fiction including The Danish Girl (2000), The Rose City (2001) and Pasadena (2002). His most recent novel is the international bestseller, The 19th Wife (2008). He has won a number of awards including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award for excellence in gay and lesbian literature. His books have been translated into eighteen languages to critical acclaim, and two of his novels are being adapted for film and television, one of them - The Danish Girl - is being produced and directed by Tom Cooper in Copenhagen at this moment in time and will be released later this year.
Ebershoff has taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He is an editor-in-large at Random House and lives in New York City.
Rating: 5/5
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