Penguin Archive: The Umbrella

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.' Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark's most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose. Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties, and was followed by many more books, including the novels The Faces and Vilhelm's Room and her autobiographical masterpiece, Childhood (1967), Youth (1967) and Dependency (1971), also known as The Copenhagen Trilogy.