Product Description

Set in the 1920s and '30s in Copenhagen, Paris and Dresden, and inspired by a true story, The Danish Girl is about one of the most passionate and unusual marriages of the 20th century. Einar Wegener and his American wife Greta Waud have been married for six years, but have yet to have a child. Both painters, they live a life of bohemian langour in Copenhagen until one day their lives are irreversibly altered. An opera singer whose portrait Greta is painting fails to turn up for her sitting. Greta asks her husband if he would put on the soprano's stockings so that she can continue her portrait. Einar agrees and as he pulls on her stockings, slips into her yellow shoes and finally draws over his head the soprano's dress, he stirs up in himself a remote sensation that he might be in part be a woman. Einar dresses more and more as Lili - the name given to her by Greta - and what started off as a game becomes a way of life for Greta and Einar. With Lili as her muse, Greta's painting begins to flourish. A Parisian art dealer spots her work and the couple move to Paris so that Greta can pursue her career as an artist. Lili is liberated too and increasingly becomes Greta's companion. As Einar fades into memory they decide that a choice has to be made: Lili or Einar. Greta finds a doctor in Dresden who is researching sex-change operations and Einar travels to Germany to become once and for all Lili Elbe. This elegantly written, sensual and engrossing novel is a wonderful celebration of love. With great sensitivity and intelligence, David Ebershoff tells the story of this extraordinary marriage, which survives the hardest test any couple could face. The Danish Girl is an unusually powerful and moving debut.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #673303 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Though the title character of David Ebershoff's debut novel is a transsexual, The Danish Girl is less explicitly concerned with transgender issues than the mysterious and ineffable nature of love and transformation in relationships.

Loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who, in 1931, became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation, The Danish Girl borrows the bare bones of his story as a starting point for an exploration of how Wegener's decisions affected the people around him. Chief among these is his Californian wife, Greta, also a painter, who unwittingly sets her husband's feet on the path to transformation when, trying to finish a portrait, she asks Einar to stand in for her female sitter. Putting on her clothes and shoes, he is shaken:

Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin, as if it were a bandage. Yes, that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze--a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter, for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna's dress could belong to anyone, even to him.

Greta encourages her husband not only to dress like a woman, but to take on a woman's persona, as well. What starts out as a harmless game soon evolves into something deeper, and potentially threatening to their marriage. Yet Greta's love proves to be enduring if not immutable.

Ebershoff's historical prestidigitation is remarkable, making it seem easy to create the sights and sounds and smells of 1930s Denmark. Even more remarkable is his treatment of Greta: he gets inside her head and heart, and renders her in such loving detail that her reactions make perfect sense. Ebershoff's sensitivity to Greta is one of the finest achievements of this startling first novel; Einar is more of a cipher. In the end, this is Greta's book and David Ebershoff has done her proud. --Sheila Bright

From the Author
A few years ago, a friend who works at a university press sent me a book his company had recently published. After pulling the book from the Jiffy bag, I quickly presumed it would not interest me. The book was on gender theory, an academic treatise on the polemics, the historicizing, the Marxist interpretations of gender and identity. Oh boy, I thought. I'm not much of a fan of literary theory and criticism, at least not those with an excessively academic posture. No, as a reader, give me story! Give me plot! Give me a setting that is beautiful or tragic and unfamiliar, and characters who are the same.

But because the book came from a friend, I decided to give it a quick read, just so I could report back with appreciation. On the subway that night, the #6, I opened it up, and there, not far into the pages, was a parenthetical reference -- a literal aside -- to Einar Wegener as the first person to ever change his gender. It said that Wegener, who had been a landscape painter in Copenhagen and Paris in the 1920s, had undergone a series of operations in 1930 at a place called the Dresden Municipal Women's clinic. And it also said that Wegener's wife, a portrait painter, had played a role in his transformation. The little book on gender theory reported that Wegener's wife, Greta, had been so in love with her husband that she would have done anything to help him, including finding him a doctor who could make him, once and for all, a woman.

I looked up from the book, into the quietly resigned faces on the crowded train -- a man with a loosened tie; a girl with a headset snaked through her red hair; a boy with a bookbag open and empty. The train pulled into the 33rd Street station and I got off. Who was Einar Wegener, I asked myself? Why had I never heard of him? What kind of marriage could survive a change as fundamental as this? It was the first time I asked myself the question that I would repeatedly ask while writing The Danish Girl: what do you do when the person you love changes? Yes, what is it that we must do?

The next Saturday I went to the New York Public Library, on 42nd and 5th, and called up a dozen books on gender identity, transsexuals, and something once referred to by the medical establishment as sexual pathology. In these books I found more references to Einar Wegener and his wife, more details about their lives: the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, where he was a professor of painting; the luminous gray light of the North Sea depicted in his landscape pictures; the brief fame Greta achieved in Paris in the late 1920s, when her portraits of her husband dressed as a woman named Lili caused a stir in the French art world.

The story became richer, with context and plot and character and motivation. And I began to wonder more and more: what kind of marriage was this? What kind of love story was at hand?

Nearly a year after first reading the book on gender theory, I made my first trip to Copenhagen. There Einar and Greta's world opened up to me.

I visited Kongens Have, the park where they strolled on fine summer evenings, and Nyhavns Kanal, the port next to which they lived. I trespassed through the soap-green hallways of the Royal Academy of Art, where Einar and Greta first fell in love. At the flea market I bought old maps and picture books that portrayed Copenhagen and the bogs of Denmark in the early part of the 20th Century. At the Royal Library I read on microfiche all the stories in the Danish newspapers about Wegener and his remarkable transformation. And I came across the diaries and correspondence of Lili Elbe (the woman Wegener became), published two years after her death.

My research took me back to Europe two other times. In Dresden a boxy cement building houses the Dresden Hygiene Museum, a creaky institution poorly funded but perpetuated by the Communists. Now it sits dusty, waiting for the few visitors it receives each day. Its small library provided me with further details of Wegener's transformation and of material life in Dresden in 1930 and 1931: the elegant arc of the Elbe River; the limestone stone facades of city now destroyed; the cast of gloom as Germany lurched into its darkest time.

Another trip took me to Paris, where I visited the medical clinics Einar and Greta first sought help from. That same trip I returned to Copenhagen for further information about Einar and Greta and to see some of their artwork, especially the candy-bright paintings painted by Greta of her husband dressed as Lili. One of those paintings is on the spine and back jacket of the American edition of the novel.

From the beginning I knew that this story was in fact more than a story about the first person to change his gender. I realized that Greta, Einar's wife, in some ways was the more complicated character, the person who had to make equally difficult decisions in her life. I knew I wanted to write the book not only as a chronicle of a man who becomes a woman but also as a chronicle of a marriage. The novel is about two people, a brave, conflicted man and a beautiful and fiercely independent woman, who are in love. It is a tale of romance and friendship and the course of a relationship. Ultimately, it is a love story, and I wrote The Danish Girl in order to explore that kind of love -- the intimate space, the nearly black cave, which two people share, as romantic love arcs from flirtation to marriage and into quotidian, devoted routine.

SOME BOOKS THAT ROCKED MY WORLD (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

SISTER CARRIE BY THEODORE DREISER
100 years old and still shocking; young Carrie's cool ambition and fast rise in late 19th century New York could easily occur in today's world of instant fame and wealth. For some reason Dreiser is falling off reading lists, and I'm not sure why. His social commentary remains accurate, his characters satisfyingly complex. A very useful book for novelists writing about a strong, intelligent, morally complicated female protagonist.

JUDE THE OBSCURE BY THOMAS HARDY
One of the saddest novels ever written, and the most poignant account of being an outsider -- something that each of us, I believe, relates to every day, no matter what our station in life. Hardy made the novel modern, in my opinion.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY
Precise in prose, wicked in humor, elegant in her summation of the moments that irrevocably change us, Welty is a master of the short story, a form, as all fiction writers know, that demands a rigor and intensity of vision more difficult to summon than what is required when writing a novel. This book is like a primer for fiction writers: her world, although such a small corner of the American South, covers most of the topics and emotions and fictional techniques that we will use in our own works.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS BY EMILY BRONTE
With its raging passions and furious winds, with the brutal character of Heathcliff and the cruelly cold moors, this novel taught me quite a bit about fiction writing, especially the importance of place and landscape to the story at hand.

ANNA KERENINA BY LEO TOLSTOY
The novel is about so much -- Russian politics, class issues, the confines of women in the 19th century. All important subjects, indeed, but ultimately this novel is about one thing, to me at least: the pleasure of reading. It is a story with sweep and scope and passion and the rich detail of an intelligent, flawed life.

About the Author
David Ebersoff is 29. He is the Publishing Director of the Modern Library at Random House in New York. He is writing his second novel, Pasadena.

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Customer Reviews

a very different love story
This story begins in 1925 in Copenhagen, and charts the marriage between a young Californian heiress, Greta, who marries her shy & reserved professor of painting, Einar. Both artists, they live and work together. When a subject does not show for her portrait sitting, Greta asks Einer to don the subject's dress to allow her to complete her painting. From this simple request, Einar's repressed longing to express himself as a female first emerges. Gradually, over the years of their marriage, he more frequently dresses as Lili, his feminine persona. Greta accepts her husband's wishes, and even encourages them in her devotion, although this leads them both to the precipice of all of their lives, Greta's and Einar's and Lili's. Sensitively written, the characters reveal their motivations only gradually, and the author maintains a distance that allows the reader to always want more. Not at all expoitative or pornographic, the subject is handled in such a way as to expose only human beings trying to express themselves, and one cannot fail to be moved by the truth of their journeys through their lives.

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE...
This is a stunning debut novel by someone who is no novice to the publishing industry, as he is the director of The Modern Library, which is a division of Random House. With this book as his entree into the ranks of novelist, Mr. Ebershoff rightly claims a place among the distinguished. This is a most elegantly written novel.

His book is loosely based upon the true story of Danish painters, Einar Wegener and Gerda Waud. They met in Copenhagen, while they were both art students, and married a few years later. He painted landscapes, while she would become known for her paintings of a mysterious sloe-eyed beauty. When it eventually became known that the model for the mysterious beauty in Gerda's paintings was, in fact, her cross-dressing husband, they became the scandal of Copenhagen. They left Denmark and sought refuge in Paris, France, where the mystery woman of Gerda's paintings began appearing in the flesh among the denizens of the Parisian demi-monde.

There is little doubt that Gerda encouraged her husband in his cross-dressing, as well as in his eventual surgical transformation. In 1930, the couple again turned the world on its head when it became known that Einar Wegener had undergone the world's first known sex re-assignment operation in Germany, and emerged as Lili Elbe. This provoked the King of Denmark himself to annul their marriage. Unfortunately, Lili Elbe's life as a surgically transformed woman ended in 1931 with her death.

The author expertly weaves these facts, which were the inspiration for this novel, into a lyrically written, haunting narrative about two people who were bound to each other by an unconditional love that would transcend the conventional. He creates an intriguing, spellbinding story that is a sensitive portrait of a most unusual marriage. The author takes the reader on a journey into the imagined psyche of these two individuals, as their marriage slowly devolves and Lili becomes more and more prominent in their lives. The author leads the reader through Lili's gradual metamorphosis, her poignant self-realization, and the final denouement of the marriage. This is an exquisitely crafted novel by a very gifted writer. Bravo!

compelling must finish type of book
A book with an usual tale of 2 artists and Lil " the third person" in this tale. Set in Copenhagen, Paris and Dresden. It is compelling to read - a different sort of love story. An interesting and enjoyable read -highly recommended