During his lifetime (1847-85), J.P. Jacobsen published three books: the novels Fru Marie Grubbe (Mrs Marie Grubbe 1876 ) and Niels Lyhne (Niels Lyhne 1880), and a book of short stories Mogens og andre Noveller (Mogens and Other Stories 1882). Further titles in this select canon, the arabesques and his other lyric poetry, were published posthumously. The melancholic anti-hero Niels Lyhne and the self-willed Marie Grubbe are only ostensibly historical novels which debate specific issues. They are not naturalist schematic novels, but sophisticated studies in the disparity between longing and fate, based on equal parts modern psychology, natural science and ontology. Desire, death, insanity and the relentless regularities of nature are recurrent themes. In both the novels and short stories the main characters are portrayed in sketches and fragmented sequences. All of Jacobsenīs works break stylistically and thematically with the prevalent conventions of genre. They are all written in a complex style, which alternates between exquisite, detailed and richly varied descriptions, often with impressionist effect, and short, matter-of-fact passages, frequently a kind of summing-up. The narratorīs comments break into the ongoing text. The writing is disconnected and visibly fragmented. The texts appear as compositions of set-pieces rather than organic unities. A red cable has not been anxiously drawn through every single characterīs stages and phases, as Jacobsen himself observed in a letter. This is the determining factor in giving his work the distinct quality of being a pioneering genre. The style and manner of composition are an important aspect of Jacobsenīs modern poetics. He foreshadows modernism by, inter alia, letting language function as its own artistic implement and by manifesting a loss of any confidently grounded world view. The germane world view which colours Jacobsenīs writing draws on existential consequences of insights gleaned by the natural sciences which transgress his contemporary deterministic Darwinism in intuitive (morphologic) anticipation of scientific cognition, topical at the time (for example, turn-of-the-century quantum theories and later neo-Darwinismīs bias towards discontinuity and monstrosity). These insights are reflected in the themes mentioned, variable pitch of styles, complex (discontinuous) systems of composition and nihilistic delineation of character.
