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The Danish Girl Summary & Study Guide

The Danish Girl Summary & Study Guide Description

Greta, the daughter of a wealthy ambassador, is a struggling artist. Married to a famous landscape artist, Einar (her former painting professor), his work and talent overshadow hers. This frustrates her to no end. She finally lands a commission to paint a portrait of a famous opera singer, named Anna. However, when Anna sends word that she can’t come in to stand for the portrait, in a panic Greta convinces her husband, Einar, to put on Anna’s dress and pose for her. He begrudgingly does. Greta finds it humorous to see him standing there holding a bunch of lilies in his hand. As a joke she calls him Lili. Secretly, however, Einar finds that he loves wearing Anna’s dress, and loves even more, the name Lili.

On a lark, he dresses up as Lili and goes out in public, accompanying Greta to several art gatherings and parties. At first he is very shy and doesn’t speak much, because of course his voice would give him away. Greta notes how beautiful he actually is, dressed as a woman, and asks if she can paint him again. He agrees. The paintings begin to bring recognition to Greta, which she loves. She insists that Einar continue to dress as Lili. While in Paris, Lili meets another painter named, Henrik. They begin to go out, but after a few months, when things are progressing nicely, Lili realizes that the truth about her true gender is going to become known and she can’t take it. She breaks off her relationship with Henrik, even though he attempts to tell Lili that he already knows the secret.

Meanwhile, the reader has learned that Greta’s parents were famous ambassadors, and growing up under their shadow, and with their wealth and status, Greta felt was a burden. Everyone treated her oddly because of her fame and fortune. Everyone, that is, except Einar who, as her professor, did not know who she was. Later, when someone told him who she was, he began acting differently, but by that time, they’d already fallen in love.

The reader also learns that Greta had been married once before. Shortly after becoming involved with Einar, the looming threat of War caused Greta and her family to seek asylum in America. Separated from Einar he writes to her that they should break things off and that they most likely would never see one another again, anyway. Despondent, Greta moves on with her life and meets a man named Teddy. They marry after a whirlwind courtship.

Meanwhile, back in the present, Einar has confessed to Greta that his father once caught him and his best friend, Hans, playing house. Einar had dressed up in his mother’s old aprons and dresses, while Hans acted like the husband. Einar’s father had caught them and run Hans off. Greta determines to find Hans again after all of these years, hoping that it will make Einar happy. Greta locates Hans who sends an invitation for them to move to Paris to live there with him. They move to Paris. It is only later that it comes out that Hans never did invite them, but Greta made it up so that Einar would leave Copenhagen, as one of the doctors had been threatening to turn Einar in for lewd acts.

While Greta’s art career is taking off, Einar’s is failing miserably. In fact, Einar takes to going to a brothel, not so much for pleasure, as to see how women moved and talked, so he could try to emulate them in private. After leaving the brothel he comes to a decision. He will sort things out and decide whether he will be Lili or Einar, and if he hasn’t figured it out in a years’ time, then he will kill himself and be done with it. Greta’s brother Carlisle comes to visit them, and Einar confesses everything to him. Carlisle vows to help him. Greta also attempts to help by contacting different doctors. She meets a Doctor Hexler, who is appalled at what he considers to be an aberrant behavior by a man. Carlisle finds a doctor that believes that Einar must have a tumor in his brain and a lobotomy will fix him right up. Luckily, while visiting a friend in Germany, she meets Professor Bolk, and they begin speaking. He’s been experimenting with gender reassignment surgeries, and is willing to speak with Einar.

Einar determines that he will go to speak with Professor Bolk and have the surgery alone. When he arrives at the women’s clinic, though, no one has been expecting him and it is a few days before they can work him in. Finally, it is time for the surgery and when Professor Bolk opens Einar up he finds out that there are a pair of shrunken ovaries inside of him. He really was female, too. The surgery is successful, and after he recovers, he goes back to Germany where Greta has moved back to their old apartment. Now, as Lili, he has also given himself a last name, based on a river that they used to see from their flat in Paris.

Lili begins seeing Henrik again, and soon, they agree to marry. Greta, who has been using Lili’s recovery as an excuse to avoid living her own life, is now faced with the reality that Lili has moved on and does not need her. Hans, meanwhile, has become close to Greta and asks her to travel with him. At first she turns him down, but then changes her mind. Meanwhile, Lili excitedly tells Greta that she’s going to go back to see Dr. Bolk for one more surgery, this time to implant a uterus so that she can carry a child for Henrik.

The surgery goes dreadfully wrong and an infection sets it. Carlisle goes to the clinic and he checks Lili out, knowing that it is only a matter of time before she dies. The book ends with Lili looking out over the Elbe river, appreciating the short happiness that she has been able to have in her life.

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Discussion questions for the danish girl.

1) What is the true nature of the marriage depicted in The Danish Girl ? What does this story say about love and intimacy?

2) Both Lili and Greta must change, for the sake of their marriage and for themselves. Discuss each woman’s evolution.

3) What role does Greta play in Lili’s transition? What motivated her to help Lili?

4) What role does the city of Copenhagen play in influencing the lives of its characters?

5) Greta loves the people in her life in different ways. How does her expressions of love change over the course of the novel.

6) When Henrik says to Lili “I already know. Don’t worry about anything but I already know” (page 60), what does he mean? Why does Lili tell Henrik she can’t see him anymore?

7) What does art and painting symbolize for Greta and Lili?

8) Why doesn’t Lili tell Greta about seeing Henrik again?

9) Why does Lili put so much faith in her final operation? What does it mean to her?

10) Discuss how Lili views her former life? What has she said good-bye to? What will she always carry with her?

11) Lili is a pioneer in the movement for civil rights for trans men and women. Discuss how much and how little has changed since her time. Do you believe she is a hero?

Discussion Questions for Book Clubs

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Op-ed: How The Danish Girl Helped Me Discover Myself

The author of the book upon which the new Eddie Redmayne film is based reflects on how uncovering trans pioneer Lili Elbe's story helped him define his own art.

When Vanity Fair released its first photo of Caitlyn Jenner earlier this summer, it made me think of another trans woman who introduced herself through a painted portrait roughly a hundred years before: Lili Elbe.

In 1930, Lili traveled from the Paris studio she shared with her wife, Gerda, to Germany, for a series of surgeries at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic to complete her transition. While there, she liked to sit on the sunny banks of the Elbe River pondering her past, when she lived as Einar Wegener, the male name and gender she was assigned at birth, and her future as herself. (The Elbe would inspire her new last name.)

Now, with Eddie Redmayne portraying her in the forthcoming film The Danish Girl , many more people will recognize Lili for what she's always been -- a trans pioneer.

I first read about Lili almost 20 years ago, when I was a young writer. Many elements of her story resonated with me -- her courage to be herself; that she had transitioned while in a marriage; the evocative settings of Europe between the World Wars; and her important place in LGBTIQ history.

One detail in particular lit my imagination: Lili's wife, Gerda, had painted several oil portraits of Lili, depicting a beautiful woman with enormous black eyes and lips like two valentines. These portraits, begun early in her transition, were the first public images of Lili. They showed Lili lying on a divan, her arms behind her head; Lili playing cards with a leg up on her chair; Lili looking over her shoulder with hooded eyes and a gaze that can mean many things. The Lili paintings became a sensation in the art worlds of Copenhagen and Paris -- viewers were drawn to the portraits of a woman whose expression had nearly as many interpretations as the Mona Lisa's.

In the same way, Lili herself has many interpretations. She can mean many things to many people. This is, in part, what makes her legacy so rich and inspiring. For me, the more I thought about Lili, the more I began to think of her life as a story of art, love, and identity.

Below: Lili Elbe by Gerda Wegener.

But I disagree with Lili's summary dismissal of her artistic talent. Lili was an artist -- her greatest creation was herself. She imagined a future life and did everything she could to create it.

I have spent many long hours looking at Gerda's paintings of Lili. They are not literal depictions of Lili, just as Monet's haystacks are not literal. They are interpretations, highly stylized, symbolic, and alive in color, full of of pinks, greens, and yellows. Yet they capture Lili's essence and spirit more vibrantly than any photographs I have seen of her. The world first met Lili through these portraits, and through these portraits, I first came to understand some of the colors, contours, and shadows of her soul.

I was curious about how and why Gerda accepted Lili into their marriage, and Gerda's role in Lili's transition. Was Gerda so welcoming out of love and devotion, a desire to nurture and protect her beloved, or were Gerda's motivations more complicated? Lili would become Gerda's greatest muse, and some of her most celebrated paintings -- now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars -- are those featuring Lili. With Lili, Gerda saw some of her ambitions as an artist fulfilled.

And the story of Lili Elbe is, of course, a story of identity. Lili is now recognized as an icon in the trans movement. Her life, both as she lived it and as she described it by coming out in interviews and in Man Into Woman , the partially fictional biography she helped write before her death, expanded the public's understanding of gender identity at the time. Since then she has inspired many of us, both trans and cisgender , to be ourselves.

Lili knew that a false life is no life at all. Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

Almost a century ago, Lili conquered these questions for herself. She posed for a portrait in an artist's studio and said to the world, This is me .

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The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

• Publication Date: February 1, 2001
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 270 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• ISBN-10: 0140298487
• ISBN-13: 9780140298482
• About the Book
• Reading Guide (PDF)
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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Danish Girl — Historical Perspectives on Gender Transition in The Danish Girl

Historical Perspectives on Gender Transition in The Danish Girl

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Words: 564 |

Published: Aug 31, 2023

Words: 564 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Historical context of lili's journey, early medical approaches to gender transition, film's portrayal of gender transition.

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(Trans)Gendering transition and identity struggle in The Danish girl and Nevada

• Original Article
• Published: 12 May 2023
• Volume 3 , article number  80 , ( 2023 )

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• Morve Roshan K.   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1400-5323 1 &
• Xu Wen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3781-1125 1  

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This article investigates transgender women’s social and linguistic issues as well as their identity struggles in American novels have closely analyzed. The selected novels The Danish Girl (Ebershoff,  The Danish Girl , 2000) and Nevada (Binnie, Nevada , 2013) deal with the social and linguistic challenges of trans women’s life journey. These novels demonstrate the intertwined social and linguistic relationships with gender performance. Sexual orientation and its multiple layers are woven around the relationship in the fields of anthropology and linguistics. It is significant to study day-to-day issues in trans women’s life. These anthropological narratives examine in detail trans women’s voices through critical gender, language and anthropological-linguistic theories. In sum, these two selected novels present a male-to-female gender transitional journey through the lens of gender consciousness, sexual orientation and consciousness of gender identity. In the analysis of these novels, this research finds that the (trans)gendering transition is a challenge for trans women and this has been represented by characters like Lili and Maria.

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The authors thank Southwest University (China) for financial support. To extend, the authors express gratitude to the journal’s anonymous blind-peer reviewers for their valuable comments and all other editorial team members for their assistance.

The authors received no funding support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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Morve Roshan K. & Xu Wen

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MKR drafted; XW gave comments on the manuscript; MKR revised the manuscript; both authors gave a final touch to finalize the manuscript.

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Roshan K., M., Wen, X. (Trans)Gendering transition and identity struggle in The Danish girl and Nevada . SN Soc Sci 3 , 80 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00665-z

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Received : 24 December 2022

Accepted : 22 April 2023

Published : 12 May 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00665-z

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