More than a hundred years after his death, Hans Christian Andersen can still lay claim to being a world-famous writer, but the world he’s famous in is the Lilliputian one of the nursery. The title of a publication from the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs aims to tell us all that non-Danes need to know: Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1874): The Writer Everybody Reads and Loves, and Nobody Knows: The Real-Life Fairy Tale of the Shoemaker’s Son from Odense who Conquered the World with His Magical Stories. Andersen would have liked this title, with its puff of magical transformation. He called one of his own works on the subject The Fairy Tale of My Life, and he certainly wanted everyone to think it was one: “Twenty-five years ago, I arrived with my small parcel in Copenhagen, a poor stranger of a boy, and today I have drunk my chocolate with the Queen, sitting opposite her and the King at the table.”

Now, for English-speakers, the arts journalist Jackie Wullschlager has written not the prettified fairy tale of Andersen’s life, but his bildungsroman. Her moving and well-written book compels interest in Andersen’s life, even for non-Danes. His milieu was first a provincial town, still filled with peasant customs, stories, and superstitions, and then the artistic and intellectual society of Golden Age Copenhagen, which included the choreographer Bournonville, the physicist Ørsted, and the philosopher Kierkegaard. Andersen was first noted for lushly romantic novels in the style of Balzac and Hugo; Only a Fiddler (1837) includes a cross-dressing Jewish heroine, which inspired Kierkegaard’s first book, an attack on Andersen’s lack of a world-view.

Andersen was stupendously unlucky in love. On the one occasion when he was sent a warm reply to one of his epistolary declarations of affection, the woman who was supposed to deliver it forgot all about it until three years later when both Andersen and the once-admired Mathilda were in love with other people. Wullschlager is apparently breaking the Danish silence over Andersen’s homosexual yearnings, particularly as recorded in his diaries, but her discussions of his sexual life are not sensationalistic. She notes, for instance, the private sexual codes in his diaries for his obsession with the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, but calmly observes that “being fêted and celebrated was a good substitute for sex.” As for his old-age passion for the ballet dancer Harald Scharff, she comments, “We can only guess at the physical details of the relationship,” and then stops.

In “The Ugly Duckling,” Andersen wrote, “It doesn’t matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you’re hatched from a real swan’s egg.” Andersen was, in fact, a real shoemaker’s son from Odense, but his relations were definitely odd ducks. His parents married two months before he was born, and his mother, eight years older than her husband, had already had an illegitimate daughter by another man; his maternal aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen; and his paternal grandfather was the village madman. Andersen remembered his grandfather well: “One day, I heard the boys in the street shouting after him; I hid myself behind a flight of steps in terror for I knew that I was of his flesh and blood.” Will what’s bred in the bone come out in the flesh? This grandfather was also a talented woodcarver, a creator of fantastic figures.

His parents didn’t have much money, but they clearly loved the odd, dreamy creature born to them. Details suggest they were unusual by Odense standards: his father carved figures for a toy theater; when the five-year-old Andersen was beaten at the local dame school, his mother enrolled him in the Jewish school instead. The occasionally idyllic parts of his childhood ceased completely at his father’s death when Andersen was eleven. Thereafter, they were poor. His mother worked at several jobs including washerwoman. Wullschlager forestalls nostalgia here: “In summer this was hard work but endurable; in autumn and winter, as she stood knee-deep for up to six hours in the icy water, it was appalling, and it was then that she became addicted to gin, which she drank partly to keep herself warm.” The young Andersen wasn’t unobservant of his mother’s plight—he later defended such women in his story “She Was No Good”—but he already showed the detachment from other people’s unpleasantness that was to mark his life. Like Peter Pan, indeed perhaps like all children, he was gay and innocent and heartless. As soon as possible, Andersen escaped from this misery, first imaginatively, through his books and dolls, then literally, earning money singing for the rich people of Odense and heading off to the big city alone at fourteen, ready to seek his fortune on the stage. At the ballet, he was cast as a troll.

His boldness in intruding his talents—he showed up at a leading ballerina’s house and started prancing about in his stockinged feet—were matched by his ineptitude—she had him thrown out as a madman. Nonetheless throughout his life there continued to be some quality that interested people in helping him. He found a kind of fairy godfather in a Copenhagen worthy, Jonas Collin, who got up a fund for Andersen’s education. The whole Collin family, “the ideal bourgeois family, successful, secure, civilized, benign,” took him in—up to a point; Edvard, the Collin son closest in age, could never bring himself to be on “Du” terms with Andersen.

In general Andersen was lucky, extraordinarily so, in his friends; even at the end of his life, he was taken in by two Danish Jewish families of wealth, high culture, and kindness. He himself was a difficult and needy friend. His foppishly dressed gawky body, his penchant for bursting into tears of gratitude or sympathy at the least provocation, his absurd fears—that he needed to travel with a rope in case of hotel fires, that he’d swallowed a pin in some meat, that a spot over one of his eyebrows would grow over his eye—could make him a ridiculous and unlovely figure. His egotism was vast and various. It could be childish: “He had no notion of time, and as pertinaciously required everyone to be at his beck and call as any curled darling in the nursery who is at once the plague and the joy of his household,” wrote an English acquaintance. It could be unctuous: “Don’t you think I’m a happy man, to have all the world love me?” His self-glorifying postures were maddening. But in Wullschlager’s view, the Andersen who wrote the 156 fairy tales penned self-portraits that are “inventive, harsh, spiritually true.” They are remarkable precisely for the knowledge they show of human foibles, wickedness, and heroism. “Every character is taken from life; every one of them; not one of them is invented. I know and have known them all,” he wrote.

Too true. For if Andersen was bad at entering into the feelings of others (he first read a story about a dying child to Edvard Collin’s wife who had watched two of her young children die), he did have a genius for seeing himself everywhere. Thus the ebullient egotism of his Darning Needle:

Once upon a time there was a darning needle who was so full of airs and graces that she actually believed herself to be the finest kind of sewing needle.… “Make way! Here I come followed by my suite!” said the darning needle, and she proudly drew the long thread after her.

Even being broken in two and lost in the gutter can’t dull her cheerful enthusiasm for herself: “She’d lost her sealing wax, and had turned quite black—but then black is so becoming! ‘I’m slimmer and more delicate than ever!’ she said to herself.” But Andersen is also present in the restless dissatisfactions of the Fir Tree who, at every stage of his life, waits for the future to be better and regrets what he has lost without having appreciated it at the time. As a baby tree in the forest, he thought, “Oh! To grow up, to grow up, to grow big, to grow old—how wonderful that would be!” Finally grown up and cut down, his tune has changed. “‘Over! All over!’ cried the poor tree. ‘How foolish I was not to appreciate my happiness! Now it’s over! All over!’” Self-knowledge here ends in ashes. Not only did Andersen connect the poles of cheerfulness and despair, self-knowledge and self-blindness, but he also had within him the cruelty of the Snow Queen, the dedication of the Little Mermaid, the preternatural sensitivity of the Princess with the Pea, the tunefulness of the Nightingale, the loyalty of the persecuted sister and her Wild Swan brothers, the mania behind Karin’s Red Shoes, the salvific imagination of the Little Match Girl, the steadfastness of the Tin Soldier, the vain self-doubt of the Emperor, and the innocent bluntness of the little child who cries, “But the Emperor hasn’t got on anything at all!”

These characters all appear within the unique mixture of humor, narrative speed, and fatalism with which Andersen experimented in the tales. The worst of them can be maudlin and just plain weird—“The Storks” tells the story of some naughty children who tease storks and “are punished by the stork bringing a dead baby brother instead of a live one.” But the best of them, while perhaps more unnerving for adults than children, cling to the imagination. His late story “The Shadow” is “a demonic tale of self-annihilation,” “a psychological horror story,” about a philosopher who lets go of his shadow and the shadow who then becomes a man without a soul. Wullschlager is right to stress its “seamless mix of comedy and nihilism;” the creepy powers at work look back to various romantic doppelgänger and forward to Kafka’s tales of entrapment, the odd humor of Beckett, the philosophical suggestiveness of Leszek Kolakowski. On his return, the richly dressed Shadow says, “I thought you wouldn’t recognize me. I’ve filled out so much—in fact, I’ve become a man of substance.” “Is it really you?” answers the philosopher. “What a turn-up for the books!” Despite his wisdom, the philosopher doesn’t prosper in his profession, and, after all, even philosophers can’t live on air. His friends tell him “‘You’re just a shadow of your former self,’ and it sent a chill right through him.” Like so many of Andersen’s fairy tales, it does not end happily.

Even when she gets a bit impatient with his sillinesses, Wullschlager clearly holds both Andersen and his work in clear-sighted affection; he would have found it insufficient, but we can be grateful for it. Her biggest claims are for Andersen’s art. He revolutionized the genre of the fairy tale. And he did this not once but twice: first as a young man by fusing elements of both folklore and Kunstmärchen with a racy naturalism of speech (in “The Darning Needle,” for example). Second, towards the end of his life, he experimented with self-reference and a fluidity of consciousness in ways that anticipate the innovations of modernism (“The Shadow” and “Auntie Toothache”). Andersen’s novels and travel books will never be much read outside a few scholarly circles. But his miniature world is recognizably his own, and there he is a Gulliver among swans.