Marie Grubbe — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Jacobsen has made a more profound impression on me emotionally than anything else I've read in recent years.' Sigmund Freud ‘In Jacobsen we have the earliest and noblest example of an author who combines a powerful imagination and a wistfully tender nature with all the finesse of the most highly developed realism.' Hermann Hesse 'One of the best books I've ever read.' Delius Marie Grubbe is loosely based on the true story of a Danish noble woman of the same name. A wealthy heiress she married the illegitimate son of Frederik The Third of Denmark and Norway. The relationship was unhappy and violent, and, after she had had several affairs, her husband divorced her allowing her to keep her substantial dowry. For the next two years, Marie Grubbe travelled around Europe with her brother-in-law and lover spending the fortune her mother had left her. On her return her father married her to a local nobleman but this relationship too was unhappy. At the age of forty-six, she finally met the man who was going to be her companion for the rest of her life: a coach driver more than twenty years her junior. A wonderful historical novel and one of the jewels of Danish 19-th century fiction 'Jacobsen was admired by Joyce for his episodic scene-to-scene abandonment of teleological narrative, and this fictional account of a real-life 17th-century woman is a fine European classic. Marie, married firstly to a bastard nobleman, then to a wealthy landowner, finally runs off with a coachman and finds the love of her life. While writers in English were anxiously purging female sexuality from their novels, Jacobsen was capturing his heroine's fearless sensuality. No wonder Rilke, Freud and Thomas Mann were also among Jacobsen's admirers ' Jane Jakeman in The Independent.