NEW YORK, NY.- Three years before she took her own life, Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen penned a draft of her obituary.

In the piece, which she titled “My Obituary” (1973), she wrote, “Before her untimely death, Tove Ditlevsen was able to write over a score of books, of which the most important are her memoirs.”

“With ruthless honesty she tells about the men with whom, out of the goodness of her prodigal heart, she shared table and bed,” she continued. “Unfortunately her contemporaries did not appreciate her honesty, which led in the end to no man daring to converse with her on the street for fear of appearing in her next volume.”

Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most popular authors. But her works were dismissed as women’s fiction in her native country, and virtually unknown elsewhere, until an English translation of her three-volume memoir, “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2021.

Hailed as an overlooked literary classic, that English translation led to dozens more in other languages, catapulting Ditlevsen to posthumous international fame.

Before she died by suicide at age 58, on March 7, 1976, she had published 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four collections of stories, in addition to her memoir, originally published as “Barndom” (“Childhood” in English), “Ungdom” (“Youth”) and “Gift” (“Dependency”).

Writing, she frequently observed, served as a means to escape the poverty of her childhood, a series of difficult marriages and her personal travails of motherhood. Later in life, she struggled with a drug addiction that stripped her of her ability to work and left her on the verge of death.

As the protagonist of both her nonfiction and her fiction, Ditlevsen crafted a brutally honest form of auto-fiction that struck a “particular nerve in our post-pandemic moment,” said Marianne Stecher-Hansen, a professor of Danish and Scandinavian literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, referring to the opioid crisis in the United States.

“She’s always writing about body politics, the intimate, physical, sexual world of women, in a way that also speaks to the moment,” Stecher-Hansen said. “She’s hit rock-star status,” she added, “and this doesn’t happen” to Danish writers.

Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen was born Dec. 14, 1917, in Copenhagen. Her father, Ditlev Ditlevsen, met her mother, Alfrida (Mundus) Ditlevsen, at a bakery where they both worked. Ditlev later became a coal stoker, but he was frequently unemployed. He was active in the Socialist Party and an avid reader. Tove had an older brother, Edvin.

She grew up in Vesterbro, a poor and working-class district of Copenhagen, during the Depression, as Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany.

Her home life was sometimes brutal.

“The world was cold and dangerous and ominous because my mother’s dark anger always ended in her slapping my face or pushing me against a stove,” she wrote in “Childhood.”

Ditlevsen described herself as lanky and unattractive, and as uneasy in most social settings. She found refuge in poetry at an early age. Because she had to help support her family, she was unable to continue her education past elementary school, but she nevertheless began publishing poetry in her early 20s.

Meanwhile, she took odd jobs, working as a maid at a boardinghouse, an office clerk, a stock clerk, a secretary in the state grain office and an assistant in a lawyer’s office. Even after she achieved fame as a literary figure, she continued to work as an advice columnist for Familie Journalen, a weekly women’s magazine.

Her father and brother were actively involved in socialist politics, and when she openly shared similar political views at work, she was fired. When she rented a room in the Osterbro neighborhood, she found that her landlady was a fervent Nazi who blasted Hitler’s speeches through the walls.

Her first husband, Viggo Moller, an author and the editor of the literary journal Wild Wheat, was more than 30 years older. Their sexless marriage lasted less than two years, ending shortly after she met Ebbe Munck, whom she married in 1942 and with whom she had her first child, Helle.

She would leave him for her third husband, Carl Theodor Ryberg, who had a child from a previous marriage whom she adopted. They also had a child of their own, Michael.

Ryberg, a physician, suffered from psychosis. He gave Ditlevsen Demerol, an opioid, and other medications to sedate her — “I love passive women,” he said, according to her memoir. She was quickly addicted. Although she became increasingly debilitated by the drugs and nearly died before entering rehab, she wrote less about her addiction than about her own deceptions.

“What if I told him I was in love with a clear liquid in a syringe and not with the man who held the syringe?” she wrote in “Dependency.” “But I didn’t tell him; I never told that to anyone.”

After she and Ryberg divorced, she married Victor Andreasen, who helped her stave off her addiction for a time, but she continued to struggle with it for the rest of her life. They lived together for 18 years; had a son, Peter; and divorced in 1973.




In 1976, after she died from an overdose of sleeping pills, Ditlevsen was buried in Vesterbro, and “there were crowds of people following her and crowding the church to honor her,” said Anne-Marie Mai, a professor of Nordic literature at the University of Southern Denmark.

“This was something that no other author had ever seen — except maybe Hans Christian Andersen,” Mai said by phone. “It was a broad audience that showed how they appreciated her and grieved her very early death.”

Although Ditlevsen’s books sold well and were included in the reading curriculum of many Danish schools, her work was often disregarded by the literary establishment.

“The modernist authors and critics, mainly male authors, thought she was an old-fashioned author, who wrote in traditional rhymes — they preferred experimental poetry — and they didn’t understand how extraordinary and rebellious she was,” Mai said.

Since her death, Ditlevsen’s literary legacy has been a source of regular debate. Her work was not included in the official Danish literary canon until 2014.

In 2016, a translator of Danish literature, Michael Favala Goldman, picked up a copy of Ditlevsen’s third memoir at an airport bookshop on his way home to Massachusetts from a trip to Denmark.

“I remember distinctly putting the book down after reading the last page, and it occurred to me that I had just read a masterpiece,” he said in an interview.

“It was written really so concisely and so tersely, but also with such energy and vulnerability,” he added, “that I felt it took a lot of courage to expose herself so thoroughly. All these complex parts came together in such a short book, and I was just so impressed.”

The original title, “Gift,” has a double meaning in Danish: “married” and “poison.” Because the narrative turns around Ditlevsen’s relationship with her third husband, he titled it “Dependency.”

Goldman applied for and received a grant to translate 15 pages into English and look for a publisher, but he was unable to find an interested party. He continued to translate the rest anyway.

Two publishers eventually vied for the rights to the translation of “Dependency,” and Penguin Classics UK published it in 2019. Bundled as a single volume with her two previous memoirs, “Childhood” and “Youth,” which had been translated 30 years earlier by Tiina Nunnally, it was a literary breakthrough.

The New Yorker compared Ditlevsen to Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2021, for its “stunning clarity, humor and candidness.” The Guardian called it “only a small part of her extraordinary legacy.”

Her memoirs have since been translated into at least 30 languages, and some of her other books, including her novel “The Faces” and her short-story collection “The Trouble With Happiness,” have also been translated, to critical success.

None of her poetry volumes have been published in English, but individual poems have appeared in international anthologies and literary journals.

“It’s not that easy to translate Ditlevsen,” Mai said, “because her language, which seems in a way so straightforward, has very complex imagery.”

Goldman said Ditlevsen was “probably right in her assessment of her own work” in her self-written obituary.

The memoirs are the most successful part of her oeuvre, because they include raw details about her mother’s fierce attachment and occasional physical abuse, her father’s dismissal of her wish to become a writer — he famously told her that “girls can’t write poetry” — and her illegal abortion.

Ditlevsen also wrote candidly about her death wish, with unsentimental emotional force.

“We, who are often more afraid of life than of death, have like one dimension more,” she wrote in an essay in 1974, “a sense of freedom at the thought that we can retire at any moment with a polite apology, as when one leaves a company prematurely.”

In Denmark, Ditlevsen has continued to have a broad readership, but she is also finally receiving some of the critical praise she lacked in her lifetime.

“She was writing as much as she could the truth, without shielding anyone, and she was writing about people who were still alive,” Goldman said. “There was a lot of anger around that.”

But, he added, “now she is redeemed 50 years later by her brilliance, and for just being way ahead of the curve.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.