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 (1805–74): 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