David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

“Do you mind if we go off for a few minutes to find that man?” Anna said. “We won’t be gone more than a minute or two.”

Lili nodded, and Carlisle’s and Anna’s shoes ground through the gravel, drifting away. Lili shut her eyes. The balcony of the whole world, she thought. Of my whole world. She could feel the sun on her eyelids. She heard a couple one bench over crunching on their candy. And beyond that the slap of water on the side of a boat. A tram called, and then the bell of the cathedral. And for once Lili stopped thinking about the misty, double-sided past and the promise of the future. It didn’t matter who she once was, or who she’d become. She was Fräulein Lili Elbe. A Danish girl in Dresden. A young woman out in the afternoon with a pair of friends. A young woman whose dearest friend was off in California, leaving Lili, it suddenly felt, alone. She thought of each of them-Henrik, Anna, Carlisle, Hans, Greta. Each, in his own way, partially responsible for the birth of Lili Elbe. Now she knew what Greta had meant: the rest Lili would have to undergo alone.

When she opened her eyes, Lili saw that Carlisle and Anna hadn’t yet returned. She wasn’t worried; they’d come back for her. They would find her in her chair. Across the river the boys were running and pointing to the sky. Their kite was lifting higher than the willows, higher than even the Augustusbrücke. It was flying up over the Elbe, a white diamond of bedsheet reaching, bright from the sun, tugging on the boys’ spool-rolled string. Then the line snapped, and the kite sailed free. Lili thought she heard the overly excited shrieks of little boys buried in the breeze, but that would have been impossible; they were too far away. But she had heard a muffled shriek somewhere; where had it come from? The boys were jumping up and down in the grass. The boy with the spool received a punch from one of his pals. And above them, the kite was trembling in the wind, swooping like an albino bat, like a ghost, up and up, and then down, rising again, crossing the Elbe, coming for her.

This is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the case of Einar Wegener and his wife. I wrote the novel in order to explore the intimate space that defined their unusual marriage, and that space could only come to life through conjecture and speculation and the running of imagination. Some important facts about Einar’s actual transformation lie in these pages, but the story, as recounted here with its details of place and time and language and interior life, is an invention of my imagination. In early 1931 when the news broke that a man had changed his gender, newspapers around the world ran accounts of Einar Wegener’s remarkable life. (It is interesting to note that Lili Elbe herself leaked the story to the press, and wrote some stories about herself, including her own obituary, under a pseudonym.) Many of those articles were helpful in writing this novel, especially those in Politiken and other Danish newspapers. Another indispensable source was Lili Elbe’s diaries and correspondence, which Niels Hoyer edited and published as Man Into Woman . Those journal entries and letters provided critical factual details of Einar’s evolution, especially regarding Lili’s first visit to Wegener’s studio, Einar’s mysterious bleeding and physical decline, and his journey to and stay at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. The passages in my book that deal with these incidents are especially indebted to Hoyer’s assemblage of Lili Elbe’s original words. Nonetheless, I have changed so many elements of Einar Wegener’s story that the characters in these pages are entirely fictional. The reader should not look to this novel for very many biographical details of Einar Wegener’s life, and no other character in the novel has any relation to an actual person, living or dead.

The number of people who played a role in bringing this book to publication is long, and to each I extend my gratitude.

My early readers: Michael Lowenthal, Lee Buttala, Jennifer Marshall, Mitchell Waters, Chuck Adams. My Random House colleagues, present and former, who never balked at having a novelist in their midst: Ann Godoff, Alberto Vitale, Bruce Harris, Joy deMenil, Leah Weatherspoon, Cathy Hemming, Sascha Alper, Benjamin Dreyer, Courtney Hodell. The staff at Viking, each a writer’s advocate: Jonathan Burnham, who intelligently edited the early drafts, my championing and deft editor Barbara Grossman, Ivan Held, Hal Fessenden, Leigh Butler, Jim Geraghty, Paul Slovak, Gretchen Koss, Amanda Patten, Paul Buckley, and Alex Gigante for his legal counsel; and for their hard work on the publication, Lynn Goldberg and Mark Fortier. For their kind assistance in Copenhagen, Liselotte Nelson, Susanne Andersen, Mette Paludan, my excellent translator Kirsten Nielsen, Luis Soria, and Peter Heering. For his help with the German chapters and publication, Georg Reuchlein. Bill Contardi, Eric Price, Todd Siegal, and Stephen Morrison each watched over the novel’s progress with godfatherly eyes.

And, finally, Elaine Koster, my agent and friend.

David Ebershoff is the Publishing Director of The Modern Library, a division of Random House. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago. Originally from Pasadena, California, he now lives in New York City. His first collection of short stories, The Dress and Other Stories , will be published early next year, and he is writing his second novel, Pasadena .