Novel
The Dangerous Age
Den farlige alder
Karin Michaëlis · 1910
Opening lines
Kære Lili! Det havde været mest passende, om jeg selv havde overbragt dig Nyheden for ret at svælge i din Forfærdelse, men jeg nænnede det ikke.
Dear Lili! It would have been most fitting for me to bring you the news myself so as to revel in your horror, but I did not have the heart.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from kb.dk
Synopsis
Elsie Lindtner, forty-two, leaves her husband Richardt, a respected professor with whom she has no fault to find, to settle on a distant island, in the Villa blanche built for her by Jørgen Malthe, a young architect with whom she is secretly in love. Alone with her servants, she writes to her friends, to her former husband and to Malthe, and keeps her diary: the changing body, boredom, jealousy, desire, and what she sees without indulgence in other women.
Context
The book came out in 1910, subtitled letters and diary notes, and caused a scandal in Europe: it sold 86,000 copies in two weeks in Germany, and Marcel Prévost, who signed the French text in 1911, then called it the most widely read novel in Central Europe. The author wrote a sequel in 1912, Elsie Lindtner. The cinema adapted it as early as 1911 with August Blom, then in 1927 in Germany with Asta Nielsen. Its form, diary and letters, makes it possible to say in the first person what the novel of the time did not put in a woman's mouth.
Who it is for
Two hundred pages of diary and letters, with no continuous plot. Translated into French as early as 1911 and into English the same year; no recent French edition found.
Prizes and reception
A scandal and a European success on its release; included in 2025 on the extended list of the new Danish literary canon.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.