The Ice Virgin

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The first stand-alone English translation of this uniquely original and powerful Hans Christian Andersen adult masterpiece The relationship between a daring young chamois hunter from the remote Bernese Oberland and a prosperous miller's daughter living in the comfortable French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud plays out a complex of themes, such as the instinctive life versus rational civilization and the role of early experience in shaping personal destiny, in this dark and affecting Hans Christian Andersen adult novella. In the terrifying Ice Virgin and her eerie minions, with their implacable hatred of mankind, we get a glimpse of the fairy tale Andersen. But The Ice Virgin, the most disturbing, ambitious, and searching of all of Andersen's narratives, is also a thoroughly absorbing story of the real world. Andersen here is writing about a world he saw as something of a paradigm of the human condition, and this lies behind the story's multilayered