The first Danish novel, or the only Danish romance?

Anna Margrethe Lasson’s Den beklædte Sandhed (The Veiled Truth)

Abstract

The article argues that Anna Margrethe Lasson’s Den beklædte Sandhed (The Veiled Truth, published 1723), which has so far been characterized as the first Danish novel, is more adequately described as a romance. In Denmark, we do not have the same tradition of distinguishing between romance and novel as in England, and not many prose romances have been published in Danish. Notwithstanding, the article demonstrates that we get a more accurate understanding of both the distinctiveness of Lasson’s work and the uniqueness of the fiction novels that were published from the 1740s onwards in Denmark, if we operate with a distinction between romance and novel. I argue that the romance genre has an unclear relationship to history and myth and thus cannot be characterized as a genre of fiction in the same way as the novel. From this point of departure, I demonstrate how this manifests itself in Lasson’s work, both in the paratext and in the juxtaposition of historical, allegorical, and mythical characters. As a final perspective, I include Peter Frederik Suhm’s attempt to write a romance – Den forliebte Philosophus eller Galli og Lycoris Elskov (The Philosopher in Love or Galli og Lycoris’s Love Story, written 1749) – and the reasons why Suhm abandoned the project. The article advances the argument that the novel genre is unique because it is fictional, and that Lasson’s work is exceptional because it is the only Danish 18th-century romance.