Andersen’s mother was an alcoholic washerwoman; his father was a poor cobbler who died when Andersen was 11; his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Andersen himself, despite his fame, was isolated by his early traumas. The loneliness is captured in his fairy tales, which are considered adult fiction in Denmark. All of Andersen’s lost boys and girls—the abandoned Little Match girl; the Little Mermaid who sacrifices her tongue in the original version—stay fixed in the memory because they are the emblems of our own early sorrows.