born on March 20, 1872 in Randers, Jutland, Denmark
died on January 11, 1950 in Copenhagen, Denmark
Danish writer
75th anniversary of her death on January 11, 2025
Biography
In 1910, a 38-year-old Danish woman who for years had been working as a journalist for foreign and domestic newspapers published a novel. This was not actually surprising given that she had published many times before. Her previous novels and short stories had all been popular - especially among women - and translated into several languages. Karin Michaëlis, a vivacious woman of small stature, had studied music and literature in Copenhagen and was known to hold unorthodox views. Her latest catchy little novel revealed that she was also a fervent champion of women’s rights.
Referred to as “the little troll” since childhood and married to the author Sophus M. since 1895, Karin Michaëlis went too far for some in 1910 by choosing to focus on a taboo subject in her new novel. The Dangerous Age, which is only 182 pages long, addresses the topic of female menopause with such emotion and candor that it caused a public outcry after its publication, with middle-class women and frightened men particularly outraged. Michaëlis dared to write about a woman yearning for sexual satisfaction, about a woman who decides to leave her husband, and about the ongoing struggle of a woman to be free. Women in Germany were indignant after the novel was published in German later that same year: “She has exposed our last remaining intimacies.” Karin Michaëlis was on the threshold of old age – and in those times, any respectable woman of 40 was supposed to live sedately and without any sexual desires – when she coined the term “dangerous age” for an entire generation. A million copies of the book were sold; her novel launched an open discussion about female sexuality and about women growing older. In the first of the three film adaptations, Asta Nielsen played the leading role.
She traveled the world, married twice, and fell in love again and again – all the while observing closely in order to later describe in detail. She portrayed couples trapped in loveless marriages, mothers who felt hatred towards their adolescent daughters, and older men who psychologically abused their younger wives. She accomplished all this before Woolf and Joyce and before the stream of consciousness technique arose.
One principle dominated the life of this humorous and lively woman: injustices must be named. She wrote impassioned appeals calling for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States. She spoke out against Hitler and Mussolini; her books were banned in Germany and Italy. In 1933 she took in Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht.
While visiting the United States in 1939, Michaëlis was warned by her friend Elna Munch, wife of the Danish Foreign Minister P. Munch, not to return in October 1939 as she had initially planned. She remained in the United States throughout the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Due to an illness, she did not return to Denmark until July 1946.
She had no children of her own, but Michaëlis wrote both educational essays on child-rearing and six books about a cheeky, inquisitive and adorable little girl named Bibi. She traveled the country with the illustrator of these volumes, Hedwig Collin, to bring Bibi into the lives of readers throughout Denmark. Karin Michaëlis died in Copenhagen at the age of seventy-eight.
(Text from 1992; corrected in 2017 on the basis of information from Kirsten Klitgård, the Danish translator of the biography published by Eddy in 2003; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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