The Danish Girl

ithdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she

In early 1931 when the news broke that a man had changed his gender, newspapers around the world ran accounts of Einar Wegener’s remarkable life. (It is interesting to note that Lili Elbe herself leaked the story to the press, and wrote some stories about herself, including her own obituary, under a pseudonym.) Many of those articles were helpful in writing this novel, especially those in Politiken and other Danish newspapers. Another indispensable source was Lili Elbe’s diaries and correspondence, which Niels Hoyer edited and published as Man Into Woman. Those journal entries and letters provided critical factual details of Einar’s evolution, especially regarding Lili’s first visit to Wegener’s studio, Einar’s mysterious bleeding and physical decline, and his journey to and stay at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. The passages in my book that deal with these incidents are especially indebted to Hoyer’s assemblage of Lili Elbe’s original words. Nonetheless, I have changed so many elements of Einar Wegener’s story that the characters in these pages are entirely fictional. The reader should not look to this novel for very many biographical details of Einar Wegener’s life, and no other character in the novel has any relation to an actual person, living or dead.

“Am I really a woman now?”
Part of Greta was numbing over with shock. Her husband was no longer alive. It

“In his abdomen,” Bolk continued, “tangled in with his intestine, I found something.” Dr. Bolk folded his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “I found a pair of ovaries. Underdeveloped, of course. Small, of course. But they were there.”

It, the tingling shock of it, felt like his soul passing through her.

Only hours before, in the black of morning, at the hands of Professor Alfred Bolk, Einar Wegener had passed from man into woman, two testicles scooped from the pruned hammock of his scrotum, and now Lili Elbe slipped into unconsciousness for three days and nights.

Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna’s dress could belong to anyone, even to him.

It became difficult for him to continue thinking about Anna singing over at the Royal Theatre, her chin leaning toward the conductor’s baton.

Einar quickly pulled the dress over his head, adjusting the lap. He was sweating in the pits of his arms, in the small of his back. The heat was making him wish he could close his eyes and return to the days when he was a boy and what dangled between his legs was as small and useless as a white radish.

“Greta,” he said, “what if I-”