One of the most enduring legacies of the Romantic mode of thought must surely be our tendency to read literature autobiographically, and this absorbing and authoritative biography makes a very good case for that practice. Jackie Wullschlager offers us, alongside the intriguing story of Andersen's life, pieced together from his diaries and letters, convincing readings of the tales that point up their autobiographical content, notably in their favouring of the lowly and empathy with the outsider. Andersen himself claimed, "Every character is taken from life; every one of them . . . "
Indeed, the analogy to his own Ugly Duckling who turned out to be a swan is irresistible: the gawky son of a cobbler and an illiterate washerwoman, half-brother to an illegitimate prostitute, becomes Denmark's most celebrated literary figure, a friend of the wealthy and a protege of kings, the ultimate Romantic hero - "It doesn't matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg."
At the age of 14, a child at odds with his surroundings and desperate for better things, Hans Christian left his home on the island of Funen to seek his fortune. Like any fairytale hero, he made the difficult and terrifying journey to Copenhagen alone, with only his pure boy-soprano voice, a small sum of money and an enormous ego as surety.
His ambition was boundless, and was matched only by his resilience in the face of constant failure to break into the world of the theatre in Copenhagen. Through a series of vicissitudes, Andersen's pursuit of fame was extraordinarily dogged: he was eventually to attain it, of course, not in the theatre but as a writer, first retelling folktales for children, then writing in that most Romantic of genres, the Kunstmarchen, and moving further and further away from the traditional fairytale.
The picture that emerges from this incisive Life is one of a man of immense vanity, outrageous snobbery and desperate neediness, yet one whom it is hard to dislike. As Andersen aged he hardly matured. Thus Wullschlager writes of him in the years 1845-6, when he was 40 years old:
Beneath Andersen's insatiable need for fame was the hollowness of the man still seeking his sense of himself. Perhaps only the ever-yielding, ever-admiring love of a parent could have helped him towards his own identity, and that Jonas Collin, Andersen's patron and father-figure, could not offer. So Andersen remained the whinging child, searching across Europe for the sort of love and absolute approval that no one accords to adults, catching glimpses of it in an adulatory newspaper article here or a flattering party guest there, as he moved from one social triumph to another.
His sexual ambivalence, treated here with candour and sympathy, was complicated by a certain prudishness, which goes some way to explaining his inability to sustain relationships except at a distance, and until he reached old age, Andersen seems to have lived in the state of emotional turmoil that most people gratefully leave behind after adolescence. By the end of his life, however, when the accolades were at last coming thick and fast, Andersen's childishness seems gradually to have transmuted into a sort of endearing child-likeness, though he remained to the end hypochondriac, fussy, self-centred and desperate for attention.
Ultimately it is, of course, not his temperament but his work that counts, and for that Wullschlager makes the bold claim that Andersen was a world-class author, "as representative a figure of the European romantic spirit as Balzac or Victor Hugo . . ." Despite some lapses into sentimentality, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen are surely luminous with wit and artistry, and one hopes that this new biography will send readers back to the stories they have loved since childhood - and which, they will doubtless find, yield up more treasures to an adult readership.
All his life, Andersen struggled with a friendship with Edvard Collin, and he was buried in a triple grave, to be joined some years later by Collin and, in turn, Collin's wife. The weirdness of this arrangement (his relationship with Collin was deep but cool) is matched only by the cruel oddity that the Collins were later re-interred in a family plot and Andersen, with peculiarly appropriate poignancy, was left to spend eternity, "alone", as he had remarked in his diary several decades earlier, "as I shall always be".
Siobhan Parkinson's novel for the nine to 12 age group, Call of the Whales, has just been published by the O'Brien Press