It was quietly paced, beautifully wrought and somehow otherworldly. While this choice seems odd to me, it didn’t prevent me from enjoying the novel. She was as Danish as Einar, but David Ebershoff himself is from Pasadena. However, though the author mentions in the afterword that it’s a work of fiction, I find it slightly problematic that only some of the names and the overall story about Einar/Lily are kept while his wife, Gerda, has been turned into an American from Pasadena in the novel called Greta (but not in the movie). The cinematography from the trailer alone tells me that the elegance has translated well to the big screen.

The novel caught my eye because I’d seen a trailer for the movie which is hitting cinemas these days (at least in Denmark), starring Eddie Redmayne as Einar Wegener/Lily Elbe. The story was groundbreaking at the time - in the attitudes that needed to be turned around and in medical history. The novel is based on real characters who lived in Copenhagen in the 1920s. It is also about what makes a marriage and how far a woman will go to let her husband find his true self, knowing that she will likely lose him in the process. The Danish Girl is a delicate, elegant novel about the search for one’s true self when one’s body, as an external encasement, doesn’t mirror what is on the inside in short, when a man is born a man in body but not in spirit.

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff