Publisher's Synopsis
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.