Anne Marie Ejrnæs

Anne Marie Ejrnæs (b. 1946) made her breakthrough as an author in 1986 with Som svalen (Like the Swallow), a historical novel about the dramatic life of the 19th-century writer Thomasine Gyllembourg. It represents a renewal of the historical novel in that it does not merely in a typical way tell the story of a life as it unfolds in relation to the historical conditions and events, but is an unusually penetrating study of the main character.

With its impressionistic language, the novel creates a great sense of intimacy and an overwhelming physical presence - a special “physicality”, which is typical of Ejrnæs’ prose.

We thus follow Thomasine Gyllembourg through a series of physical processes: the undefinable childhood sensations and the trauma after the loss of her mother, which evinces itself in the form of psychosomatic symptoms, later intensified through the unhappy marriage to P.A. Heiberg. The contrast to the physically subversive coldness is then represented by her sexual flowering in her life with Baron Gyllembourg.

Ravnen (The Raven, 1983) - the novel Anne Marie Ejrnæs wishes had been her first - is about a young Danish woman’s meeting with the unknown continent that invalidates all her received preconceptions.

The intensely perceived detail and an impressionistically pictorial style are characteristic of the entire oeuvre, with the focus on the encounter with the unknown, the person thrown out into crises or extreme situations.

Anne Marie Ejrnæs books are written on the basis of thorough research into historical background from the customs and habits of everyday life to the principles behind. The two related family novels, Sneglhuset (The Snail’s House) (1991) and Theas færd) (Thea’s Journey) (1999) can be called historical. However, the first of them has a contemporary narrator reflecting her own divided nature in her grandmother’s traditional female life from being a child in a poor part of Jutland in the 1880s until she is a middle-aged farmer’s wife in better circumstances some way in the 20th century. In the next volume, the novel turns into a portrayal of the gradual disintegration of rural society reflected through Thea’s story.

Anne Marie Ejrnæs is a great portrayer of the female psyche. With a broad horizon, she has studied women’s conditions of life and their potential for personal development in Danish society from the start of the 19th century to the present day she gives concrete expression to this in her portrayals of the moving fates of women from both a Jutlandic peasant milieu and the trend-setting literary circles in Copenhagen. And in her more ambitious journeys to other countries she has confronted us with other ways of living and thinking, with glimpses of the religious Europe of the 14th century, the Arab society of the 18th century and modern Africa.