Jens Peter Jacobsen

Jens Peter Jacobsen (Thisted, 1847 – 1885) was a Danish naturalist and writer who helped launch naturalism in Danish literature. He wrote in Danish and is associated with the Modern Breakthrough, the movement that reshaped Scandinavian letters in the late nineteenth century. His body of published fiction is small, but his precise treatment of nature and of the inner lives of his characters made him one of the most influential Danish writers of his time.

Born in Thisted, in northwestern Jutland, to a prosperous merchant family, he showed an early gift for science, especially botany. He studied at the University of Copenhagen and in about 1870 took up botany as a profession, though he was already writing poetry in private. Drawn to Darwin, whose work was little known in Denmark, he translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into Danish. Tuberculosis, which he contracted when young, cut him off from fieldwork, sent him travelling in southern Europe and eventually pushed him toward literature.

In the spring of 1873, encouraged by the critic Georg Brandes, who admired his command of expression, he began the historical novel Fru Marie Grubbe. Its heroine, a seventeenth-century noblewoman who falls from high society into a humble life, lets him examine female desire and the pressure of social expectation. His second novel, Niels Lyhne, follows an atheist who searches for meaning in a merciless world. His prose is marked by exact descriptions of nature and by scenes that work more like paintings than plotted action; his poetry, closer to late Romanticism, looked ahead to Danish Symbolism in the 1890s.

His reach extended well beyond Denmark. Rainer Maria Rilke read and recommended his work, and Thomas Mann, George Gissing and D. H. Lawrence acknowledged his influence. Today he is regarded not only as the founder of Danish naturalism but as its finest exponent.