In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

FSG’s forthcoming edition of the Copenhagen Trilogy.

It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen. This was in spring 2018, when I was commissioning features for the first issue of The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women, the rare books catalogue–cum–literary magazine of which I’m the managing editor. “She is loved by generations of women and put down by generations of men,” Nors wrote in an email. “She was also nuts and quite extraordinary in her personal life. Many men, drug addictions, often submitted to mental institutions, and LOVED by women readers. I mean: LOVED!”

This was more than enough to intrigue me, but Nors’s finished piece, “The Suicide of Tove Ditlevsen,” only left me all the more fascinated. In it, Nors describes Ditlevsen—who was born in Vesterbro, a working-class district in Copenhagen, in 1917, and killed herself at age fifty-eight in 1976, after many years battling depression and addiction—as “the Billie Holiday of poetry, accessible, complex, and simple all at the same time. There’s a special mournful sweetness in the earlier poems that belongs to the girlish. Later, her prose turned the dreams and disappointments of life as a woman inside out.”

I was keen to read anything of Ditlevsen’s that I could, but despite what seemed to be her relatively steady popularity in Denmark, few of her books had been translated into English, and those that had were out of print and hard to track down. Then, in one of those joyfully serendipitous moments that do somehow seem to happen in the world of publishing, less than a year after we’d published Nors’s essay, I found myself having lunch with a publicist from the Penguin Classics list here in the UK who was raving about their forthcoming reissue of the forgotten Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s “astonishing” three-volume memoir, the Copenhagen Trilogy.

The minute the galleys arrived I fell on them greedily, hoping I wouldn’t be disappointed. I needn’t have worried. Ditlevsen’s autobiographical series—comprised of Childhood (Barndom; 1967), Youth (Ungdom; 1967), and Dependency (Gift; 1971)—is an absolute tour de force, the final volume in particular. They’re as brilliant as I’d been led to expect, but also surprisingly intense and elegant. Ditlevsen’s writing (Childhood and Youth are translated by Tiina Nunnally, and Dependency by Michael Favela Goldman) is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw. Together, the trilogy tells the story of Ditlevsen’s journey as a writer; as a woman, wife, and mother; and, most candidly of all in that piercing final volume, as an addict. As the trilogy progresses, it becomes clear how deeply intertwined these three different threads of her life were.

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