Although this is a highly readable, extremely informative biography, the death of my Hollywood-derived impressions of Hans Christian Anderson, as personified by Danny Kaye, was a tortured one.

As Wullschlager clearly illustrates, Anderson was not a very likeable character. Easily wounded and quick to take offense (even where it was unwarranted), strangely self-assured to the point of embarrassing those around him with his pomposity and silliness (if not himself), he seems to have been almost incapable of giving the same friendship that he demanded of others. Even so, Wullschlager succeeds in making him sympathetic. Rather than try to make excuses for his behavior, she just lays out the facts and presents him as he was. She is particularly effective when she associates events in Anderson's life with the fairy tales and repeating literary themes they inspired.

That Anderson was able to transform his inner demons into timeless, allegorical tales that are both touching and uplifting is remarkable. That he was able to do so after having overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles in his background and early education marks him for the genius he was-warts and all.

This is a very good biography of an unusual, but brilliant, story-teller.

A well-researched critical, yet sympathetic biography of the complex brilliance which was Hans Christian Andersen.
When you reach the pages describing his death, you feel like you have lost a dear friend. HCA was known for his children's fiction, but in fact, many of his works are for adults. This biography is particularly interesting as it gives some insight into his little known adult works, together with his character, and places his work in the cultural context in Europe in which it found itself.

Others collected folk stories and retold them; but Hans Christian Andersen's efforts stood out from his peers in that he was the first to create fairy stories himself. Surprisingly, this is the first comprehensive study of Andersen and his work to be published in English, telling of his life and poverty, his struggle to achieve fame, and the psychological forces which drove him to keep on producing. A fascinating and different portrait of the man evolves.

Victorians are experiencing something of a comeback after decades of censure as the strange, repressed, half-crazy relatives we don't want to tell anyone about. We are discovering that the Victorians were not so different from us.

The Victorians did, however, produce their own brand of eccentricity and none are as delightfully eccentric as the Victorian/Edwardian writers for children discussed in Inventing Wonderland. Jackie Wullschlager starts with that greatest of all Wonderland writers, the master himself Lewis Carroll and ends with Jazz Age Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

The eccentricity of these Victorian writers is their confident, and sometimes troubling, obsession with childhood itself. Wullschlager assures us, correctly, that these writers' obsessions did not cross the line into pedophilic behavior. To 21st century sensibilities this seems scarcely creditable, especially after reading letters by Lewis Carroll to various girl children. Carroll, Lear, Barrie and Grahame's effusions about childhood can only be understood within the context of the Victorian age, the age that produced and adored Wordsworth's overly quoted (then and now) "But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood).

Wullschlager is, I think, a bit too dismissive of Milne, who is regarded in the text as a has-been, clinging to the last remnants of the Victorian celebration of childhood. Wullschlager's overall point in this regard, however, is well made. The Victorians invented and took seriously the concept of childhood as a wonderland. Consequently, they produced children's writers of a truly magnificent stature. When the concept of childhood=innocence & pleasure was abandoned, in the early 20th century (thank you, Freud!), the result was an almost tongue-in-cheek parody of the earlier writers. It just wasn't possible to take childhood that seriously anymore.

Writers for children have of course continued to produce masterpieces, largely in the fantasy area, but that particular brand of unself-conscious Victorian nonsense and idyllicism may be lost forever. The Victorians are not as strange to us as we may like to believe, but they are certainly unreproducable.

Recommendation: Interesting, well-written, well-paced. Not the most complete biographical sketches but a complete analysis of biography and art. Give it a try.