Peter Nansen
1861–1918
Biography
Peter Nansen worked in Denmark as a novelist, a newspaper writer and a publisher. He was born in Copenhagen in 1861 and passed away in the Danish town of Mariager in 1918. While studying political science he also wrote for the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, and from 1884 he spent nearly ten years at Politiken, often under pseudonyms. In 1896 he joined the publishing house Gyldendal as a literary director, and he stayed there until 1916.
His best-known work is Love's Trilogy, three linked novels about love: Julie's Diary (1893), Maria (1894) and God's Peace (1895). Pierre Bonnard, the French painter, illustrated Maria, and his pictures for it appeared in the Paris review La Revue Blanche in 1897, where they won the praise of Renoir. Julia Le Gallienne's English translation of the trilogy followed in 1908.
His writing has a chatty, teasing tone, with light irony and a touch of sarcasm, even when he meant to attack a cause or an opponent in earnest. His stories are usually small in scope, a single love affair or a triangle of lovers, handled with enough lightness to make bold material easy to read. Commentators generally see the critic Georg Brandes as a major influence on him. The book held on this site is Maria: En Bog om Kærlighed, the middle volume of the trilogy, in its original Danish.
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Books
Maria: En Bog om Kærlighed
by Peter Nansen
A worldly Copenhagen man, used to light affairs, meets young Maria and finds himself, for the first time, truly in love. In sixty-four short numbered sections he records their meetings, his happiness and his fear of losing it. Peter Nansen's slender, intense book is a companion…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.