البجعات المتوحشات by Hans Christian Andersen

For years, he was infatuated with the Swedish opera diva Jenny Lind, but his great erotic love was reserved for Edvard Collin - a boyhood beloved who remained the single most intense emotional relationship throughout Andersen’s life. By all biographical evidence, he died a virgin.

In a letter home, she described Andersen as “a tall, gaunt figure of the Lincoln type with long, straight, black hair, shading a face striking because of its sweetness and sadness,” adding that “it was perhaps by reason of the very bitterness of his struggles, that he loved to dwell among the more kindly fairies in whose world he found no touch of hard humanity.” Hans Christian Andersen (Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen, 1836)Īndersen’s struggles were ones of a heart unsettled, ambivalent, at war with itself. Her studio in Rome became a pilgrimage site for royalty and luminaries, drawing such esteemed admirers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Mitchell, the Prince of Wales, the Crown Princess of Germany, and the exiled queen of Naples (who would become Hosmer’s lover).Īmong her famous visitors was Hans Christian Andersen (April 2, 1805–August 4, 1875) - a man of supreme storytelling genius and aching self-alienation, which Hosmer instantly intuited. Harriet Hosmer - whose remarkable forgotten story I tell in Figuring ( public library), from which this essay too is adapted - was not yet thirty when she became the world’s first successful female sculptor, claimed a place for American art in the European pantheon, and furnished queer culture with a bold new vocabulary of being.

البجعات المتوحشات by Hans Christian Andersen