Søren Kierkegaard (1813 — 1855) was one of the greatest thinkers, writers and philosophers of the nineteenth century. I consider him thus for his intensity, imagination, psychological insight, thoroughness of analysis, his uncompromising rejection of intellectual pretense and his determination to speak to essential features of human living. His two huge authorship collections; one pseudonymous, including Either/Or (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1856) and others, and one signed, including Works of Love (1847) and For Self-Examination (1851) and others, are exceedingly complex in their relationships to each other and to his overall project as a writer. Perhaps as complex and intense was his character; passionate, ironic, incredibly self-reflective, sensitive and uncompromising.

In September of 1840, in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard, then twenty-seven, proposed marriage to Regine Olsen, who was nineteen. Eleven months later he broke off the engagement, leaving Regine distraught and her family angry and embarrassed. But this was not the end to their intimate connection, indeed it was its truest beginning, preceding Regine’s marriage Frederic Schlegel in 1847 and lasting until Kierkegaard’s death in 1855, perhaps until Regine’s death.

Joakim Garff’s wonderful book is the story of that relationship, and is the first full account of who Regine Olsen was; her intelligence, bravery, passion and her steadfastness. Why did Kierkegaard fail to follow through with the engagement? In his Journals, he is pretty clear about it. Garff describes Kierkegaard as a “writing machine” and indeed he was. In just the years around which the engagement took place he finished his four-hundred-page dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, and quickly wrote the eight-hundred and fifty page, two volume masterpiece, Either/Or, one of the great books of the century. Kierkegaard saw his future as a writer not just as a passion, but as a sacred vocation. He could not stop and had no right to do so. His mind was overflowing with ideas, he had a project for his writing. In these circumstances, he saw such a marriage as impossible, as necessarily failing in the face of this. And too, there were his melancholy and his fluctuating moods. He wrote, “Ah! I paid dearly for once misunderstanding my life …” And, of course, Regine did as well.

The marriage did not happen, Regine married another, but the couple – Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen — continued, or perhaps began. They saw each other with a contrived regularity. In this context, the use of that word “saw” is unique in its literality. That is all they did. They did not touch, laugh, smile or speak to each other. They knew each other’s habits and would pass each other along the street, in the park, in the vestibule of church. They would reveal themselves only with their presence. Each was a person of great probity. In several journal entries Kierkegaard refers to seeing Regine Olsen “every other day” or “almost every day”.  And Regine Olsen appears everywhere, in many obvious disguises, in Kierkegaard’s writing. He dedicates, On My Activity as a Writer (1851) to: “A Contemporary. Whose name must still be suppressed, but whom history will name … as long as it mentions mine.” Elsewhere he calls her his “… heart’s Sovereign Mistress,” and “that One Individual” to whom all is work is dedicated.

In March of 1855, Regine was to leave Copenhagen for St. Croix in the West Indies where Fritz would serve as governor. On the departure date Regine search wildly for Søren and, finding him, she spoke aloud after fourteen years of silence, in what would be their last glimpses of the other, “God bless you—may all go well with you.” Her voyage was 4000 miles and Kierkegaard would die back in Copenhagen, at age forty-two, soon after it ended.

Joakim Garff tells the story of Regine’s five years of harsh life in St. Croix through her letters to her sister, Cornelia, letter he was given in 1996 by Cornelia’s grandchild. She withstood malaria, boils, incessantly boring social occasions and the oppressive heat. He letters are beautifully written, formal, and mention Kierkegaard in only the most oblique fashion.

Upon the return to Copenhagen of Regine and Fritz, there was one final confrontation with the now-deceased Kierkegaard, one final blow to husband Fritz, who was always second in Regine’s heart. Kierkegaard’s journals were gradually published, opening to all in Copenhagen Kierkegaard’s most intimate views of Regine and their engagement. The Journals’ contents became the “talk of the town”. In the last years of her life Regine invited writers to her home to provide her side of the great love story. But none of it could match the masterful account in Kierkegaard’s Journals. Regine Olsen died at age 82 in 1904.

This is a unique and beautiful love story, very well-told by the Joakim Garff and artfully translated by the Kierkegaard scholar, Alastair Hannay. I very highly recommend it.

© 2017 John Mullen

John Mullen is a writer living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He has written the widely-read, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in The Present Age (1995), and the recent novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers (2017).