SOURCE: "Alternatives in the Nineteenth Century," in Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, translated by Denis M. Sweet, MIT Press, 1982, pp. 191-222.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1975, Mayer discusses Andersen's outsider status and sexual orientation as revealed in his novel Only a Fiddler and in his fairy tales.

In chapter 7 of The Story of My Life,¹ which deals with the period 1835-1837, Hans Christian Andersen reports a curious incident in his relations with Søren Kierkegaard. Andersen, born in 1805, was in his thirties. Kierkegaard, of the generation of 1813 along with Georg Büchner, Hebbel, and Richard Wagner, was still a student at the time, but he knew all manner of people in Copenhagen, among them the controversial Andersen, a child of poverty from the island of Fyn. Andersen had just published his third novel: The Improvisatore and O. T. were now followed by Only a...