Hans Christian Andersen & Bipolar Disorder: the Diaries Behind the Fairy Tales

Hans Christian Andersen wrote "The Ugly Duckling" about himself, and he said so. It is the least subtle piece of autobiography in world literature: the awkward, oversized, mocked outsider who turns out to belong to a different species altogether.

He also kept diaries for most of his life, and they record something more complicated than a rags-to-riches story — a man who oscillated between euphoric confidence and complete self-annihilation, sometimes within the same week.

Odense

Andersen was born in 1805 in Odense, into genuine poverty. His father was a shoemaker who died when Hans was eleven; his mother was a washerwoman who later struggled with alcohol; his grandfather was mentally ill and a local figure of ridicule, which Andersen witnessed and never forgot.

He was a strange child by every account — tall, gangly, with an extraordinary singing voice, prone to elaborate imaginative performances, and relentlessly bullied. At fourteen he went alone to Copenhagen to become famous, which is an insane plan that happened to work.

He was taken up by patrons, sent belatedly to grammar school — where a headmaster humiliated him so thoroughly that he described it decades later as the worst period of his life, and continued to have nightmares about it — and eventually broke through as a writer in his twenties.

What the Diaries Show

Andersen's diaries are unusually complete and unusually unguarded, and they show a man whose internal weather changed constantly.

In elevated phases he records exhilaration, certainty of his own genius, torrents of writing and travel, and social confidence that let him charm his way into the households of half the crowned heads of Europe. He travelled obsessively — some thirty extended journeys across the continent — and produced at extraordinary volume: 156 fairy tales, plus novels, plays, poetry and travel books.

In the low phases he records humiliation, worthlessness, obsessive rumination over slights, and despair about his work and his appearance. Bad reviews could put him into a state that lasted weeks.

Alongside this runs a catalogue of anxiety that is genuinely striking: a terror of fire that led him to travel with a coil of rope for escaping hotel windows; a fear of being buried alive, for which he left notes by his bed asking not to be presumed dead; anxieties about dogs, about passports, about losing money. Some of this reads more like an anxiety disorder or obsessive-compulsive traits than a mood disorder.

The Loves That Went Nowhere

Andersen fell in love repeatedly and catastrophically, with women and with men, and appears never to have had a physical relationship with anyone. His diaries record intense attachments to Riborg Voigt, to Louise Collin, to the singer Jenny Lind — who told him she regarded him as a brother, an episode widely thought to lie behind "The Nightingale" — and to Edvard Collin, the son of his patron, to whom he wrote letters of unmistakable romantic intensity and who firmly declined the intimacy.

Each rejection produced a documented depressive episode. Whether that reflects illness or simply a man with an unusually thin skin and a life of accumulated rejection is exactly the interpretive problem this article keeps running into.

So Was Andersen Bipolar?

The case is moderate: better than Mozart's, weaker than Woolf's.

In favour: decades of diary evidence describing alternation between elevated, expansive, hugely productive periods and prolonged despairing ones; enormous creative output concentrated in bursts; and restless travel of a kind that can accompany elevated mood.

Against: Andersen's low periods are almost always traceable to a specific trigger — a bad review, a rejection, a social humiliation — which looks more like extreme rejection sensitivity than autonomous depressive episodes. The elevated periods may equally describe an exuberant, theatrical temperament. And the anxiety and phobic material, which is the most vividly documented thing in the diaries, is not a bipolar feature at all.

Our reading is that Andersen was certainly someone with significant, lifelong psychological difficulty, and that bipolar disorder is one plausible frame among several.

Legacy

Andersen's tales have been translated into more than 125 languages and are among the most widely read stories ever written. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected, Andersen invented — and he wrote for adults as much as children, which is why "The Little Match Girl" ends the way it does and why "The Little Mermaid" is nothing like the film.

His recurring subject is worth noting for readers of this site: the outsider who is wrong for their world, who suffers for it, and who is sometimes redeemed and sometimes simply destroyed. He wrote both endings, repeatedly, and he was honest enough not to pretend that the first was more common than the second.

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