Soren Kierkegaard

field of vision [and] delight the soulwith your mastery of language and ideas—
and that the things you proclaim are not really new discoveries of your own,
but have existed as eternal truths since—yes, since eternity, of course. But
all the same, inasmuch as, before you did so, no one had proclaimed these
truthsto mein such a manner that I could hear them (with the ears of my
soul, that is) so that they took up their dwelling place in me and became
my eternal possessions—I must surely be permitted to feel grateful to you,
who awaken and enrich my thoughts!... And then this enchanting irony
that makes you so indescribably superior and has an almost intoxicating
effect on me.... I thought that I knew what it meant to laugh even before
1843, but no, only then, when I readEither/Or, did I get a notion of what
it means to laugh from the bottom of one’s heart; and for the most part it
was with my heart that I came to an overall understanding of the whole of
what you said.... Now youmustn’t think that the only thing I have
learned from these books is how to laugh. Oh, no, please believe that you
have again and again awakened me so that I see myself and understand my
task more clearly....ButIdohope that you will concede that it is no easy
task to alter the whole of one’s inborn nature....Now, if you think that
I have managed to say one-twentieth of what I had to say to you, you are
in error, but as a matter of form I shall come to a close, happily and gratefully
signing myself one of your devoted female readers, S. F.”
Not quite two months later, on July 12, another letter arrived from a
female admirer. Her name was Petronella Ross. She was deaf and had spent
a number of years as a housekeeper for Poul Martin Møller’s father, after
which she decided to enter a sort of convent, a residence for unmarried
women of gentle birth, on the island of Falster. When she wrote her letter,
Ross was in Copenhagen visiting her brother, a captain of infantry who
happened to be Kierkegaard’s next-door neighbor, and she asked Kierke-
gaard to lend her a copy ofChristian Discoursesor “another of your works
that you are not in too much of a hurry to have returned.” She also wanted
to speak with Kierkegaard, whose brother and sister-in-law Elise Marie
(“Maria”) Boisen (now long-since deceased) she remembered from her
youth. She confided in Kierkegaard that “I enliven my solitude by testing
my skills at writing,” and had written a “couple of tales of country village
life” which Professor Sibbern had helped her get published. Sibbern had
issued them under the titleStories for Simple Readersbut had alas had the
most unfortunate idea of replacing her splendid name with the dreadful
pseudonym “Miss Deargood.” And to make things worse, a great many
typographical errors had found their way into the final portion of the work.
Nevertheless, if Kierkegaard would be interested in seeing these “little
pieces” despite her rather lukewarm recommendation, the deaf conventual