Angel Classics A Story from the Dunes: and other stories

Like The Ice Virgin, this novella unites the immediacy of the fairy-tale and the novel's concern with social perspectives. It was published in 1859, the year of Darwin's Origin of Species . A son of high-ranking Spanish parents is born out of shipwreck and lives his life in an alien country without knowledge of his origins.

In the context of the new Darwinian interpretations of human existence, and with the unforgiving setting of the remote fishing community of northern Jutland, Andersen tells a moving story of a life in which the fittest does not survive. Andersen, a passionate believer in the soul, found meaning not in challenges to Christian belief but in ordinary and obscure lives.

Three further stories present the everyday world with gentle touches of fantasy: a demonstration of the arbitrariness of social position; a delightful squib on the literary life; and an elegiac tale which is probably Andersen's last.