Description
In her unique dual biography, Kate Ashton delineates the parallel lives of Hans Christian Anderson and Søren Kierkegaard, their personal relationship, literary careers, and lasting cultural influence on the western and wider world. These two towering literary geniuses followed radically divergent paths, and yet each read and reacted to the immense power and depth of the other’s growing oeuvre as it refracted their own. Against the backdrop of the end of Golden Age Denmark within a warring Europe, and the spiritual and sexual repression of Reformed Christianity, each suffered the fate of the prophet unhonoured in his hometown of Copenhagen.
Tracing their lives from childhood trauma to tragic love affairs and anguished isolation, Ashton illuminates counteractive response to experience: one an inward search for truth and self-knowledge, the other flight into distraction and fantasy. Mirrored Minds offers the reader an opportunity to explore each author and his legacy within the context of the other, just as their long-standing association held up a mirror for Anderson and Kierkegaard themselves.
About the Author
Kate Ashton is a writer and translator. Having begun her editorial career with Nursing Times in the 1970s, she has since published full-length fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. She lived in the Netherlands for twenty-five years, working as corrector and translator on English-language texts including for business-to-business magazines, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the Frisian Academy. Since returning to Scotland in 2003, she reads, reviews, and translates from Dutch and Frisian.
Contents
Preface
1. Divine Doubt
2. A Lowland Habitat
3. The Path to Perdition
4. The Bridge of Sighs
5. Lily of the Valley
6. A Palace of Pretend
7. Into the Silence
8. Shadow Boxing
9. Esquisse
10. To Will One Thing
11. Divine Folly
Endorsements and Reviews
In Mirrored Minds, Kate Ashton thoughtfully explores the neglected connection between Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen. With keen insight, she examines their intertwined lives, creative struggles, and continuing impact, offering a profound reflection on faith, doubt, reality, and imagination. Beautifully written, this book is not only fascinating but a joy to read.Prof. Andrew Torrance, Professor of Theology, School of Divinity, University of St Andrews
The very different writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen continue to attract, inspire, and challenge. They were contemporaries in a Copenhagen that Kierkegaard referred to as a provincial market-town, both knew deep childhood trauma and neither was able to find lasting solace in human love, but their imaginative adventures led them in very different directions—Andersen ever at risk of sentimentality, Kierkegaard proposing a radical and audacious version of Christian faith. Kate Ashton is deeply sympathetic to both authors and brings to life the acknowledged and unacknowledged passions that moved their creative work and brilliantly sketches the often uncomfortable counterpoint of their rival literary careers. Ashton writes with verve, flair, and insight and brings her subjects to life in all their awkward, flamboyant, and self-lacerating complexity. Rarely has the story of Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine Olsen been told with such a keen sense for the passion that outlasted its unhappy ending.George Pattison, University of Glasgow
