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The Umbrella
'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.
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.
102 pages, Paperback
Published April 17, 2025
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325 people want to read
About the author
Tove Ditlevsen
117 books1,093 followersTove Ditlevsen var en dansk forfatter, som hentede inspiration i sit eget liv som kvinde. I sin digtning og som yndet brevkasseredaktør i Familie Journalen udfoldede hun en dyb psykologisk indsigt i moderne kvinders splittede liv. Hendes evne til at udtrykke sammensatte følelser i et enkelt og smukt sprog fik betydning for flere generationer af læsere.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
April 17, 2025
it's the tiniest things that can either make us or break us. unfortunately, every one of the stories in this collection is about being broken.
November 28, 2025
Cried on the train
August 13, 2025
4,5 ⭐️
in this collection of prose everybody is longing for something that they don’t have, the dominant constellations are unfulfilled marriage and children lacking parental love. furthermore most of the characters either have a mental or physical condition feeding into their low self-consciousness.
the short story the collection is named after, „the umbrella“, made me tear up because it described the female wish to have something of her own - without judgement, no strings to her husband attached and how he still controls her and her narrative, depriving her of that one thing and thereby a self-determined life.
another story that struck with me, was „a nice boy“. it’s about a foster child who has to work double hard and fights for the simple right to exist and belong. he’s keen to express gratitude for being saved from his former biological parents and competes with his foster parents‘ biological child for approval and love.
there is hardly any other author who catches this sense of being lost and worth less than everyone else than tove ditlevsen.
i also loved the creepy foreshadowing in „his mother“ and how these short stories show different aspects of motherhood: protection of their children, bitterness, being emotionally present and the perfect domestic wife in contrast to the absent fathers, etc. etc.
if you enjoy slightly disturbing prose that digs deep in only a few pages, go read literally anything by tove ditlevsen.
in this collection of prose everybody is longing for something that they don’t have, the dominant constellations are unfulfilled marriage and children lacking parental love. furthermore most of the characters either have a mental or physical condition feeding into their low self-consciousness.
the short story the collection is named after, „the umbrella“, made me tear up because it described the female wish to have something of her own - without judgement, no strings to her husband attached and how he still controls her and her narrative, depriving her of that one thing and thereby a self-determined life.
another story that struck with me, was „a nice boy“. it’s about a foster child who has to work double hard and fights for the simple right to exist and belong. he’s keen to express gratitude for being saved from his former biological parents and competes with his foster parents‘ biological child for approval and love.
there is hardly any other author who catches this sense of being lost and worth less than everyone else than tove ditlevsen.
i also loved the creepy foreshadowing in „his mother“ and how these short stories show different aspects of motherhood: protection of their children, bitterness, being emotionally present and the perfect domestic wife in contrast to the absent fathers, etc. etc.
if you enjoy slightly disturbing prose that digs deep in only a few pages, go read literally anything by tove ditlevsen.
December 10, 2025
Contains the same set of stories (minus some) as The Trouble With Happiness bee tee dubz
January 14, 2026
Included in the collection The Trouble With Happiness: And Other Stories, all translated by Michael Favala Goldman and first published in English in 2022, these ten short stories give an insight into Ditlevsen’s bleak worldview in which women and men and even children struggle to understand each other as well as themselves.
Reflecting aspects of Ditlevsen’s own disturbed life, at different stages afflicted by alcohol and drug addiction, several divorces and eventual suicide in 1976, this is not a sequence to consider tackling if you’re looking for positive, uplifting reflections on life.
But that’s not a reason for giving it a wide berth: her skill in evoking the kinds of ordinary domestic scenes and situations that are universal, regardless of period and geography, is one to be savoured; and, in depicting the kinds of turning points in life that many of us may possibly recognise in retrospect, we can start to appreciate just how well Ditlevsen can suggest so much in so few words.
It’s those kinds of pivotal moments I want to focus on first. For example, in ‘The Umbrella’ ('Paraplyen') Helga has all her life looked for an indefinable something that would bring her contentedness, blotting out a sense of inadequacy and lack of fulfilment, an inadequacy reinforced in her childhood and now by marriage with Egon. Forced to fill the role of dutiful housewife in a Copenhagen flat she comes to believe the ownership of a yellow umbrella will bring her that happiness and fulfilment; but as a crisis in her marriage to Egon fast approaches will acquiring such an umbrella avert disaster or ameliorate matters? In similar fashion ‘The Cat’ ('Katten') touches on an acquisition, a stray feline which accepts food but, not being house-trained, is unwelcome as far as the man of the house is concerned. His humdrum marriage to Grete has settled into dull routine, but Grete’s whole focus is on this smelly cat. Matters come to a head when one of his attempts to banish it from the house prove he is no longer master of what he thinks of as his domain.
But it need not be a physical object that turns out to be a sliding-door moment. In ‘My wife doesn’t dance’ ('Min kone danser ikke') this chance remark in a phone conversation overheard by the wife could be the straw that breaks what, on the surface at least, seems to be an amiable-enough marriage. Her disability, caused by polio (what used to be called childhood or infantile paralysis), always meant certain social invitations were out of the question; to her future husband it was never a barrier to fondness and a wedded life, nor did he ever talk about it to her. Yet in this one instance it is as though she is living with a stranger, one who doesn’t know her, doesn’t understand her: inwardly she rages: “It’s over, she thought. Not yet, not tomorrow. Maybe he’ll never know it’s over.”
‘His Mother’ ('Hans mor') starts to change the template of troubled marriages by the tale of a young woman going with her young lover Asger to meet his aged mother, a crone-like figure who looks old enough to be his grandmother. The mother is surrounded by portraits of relatives both living and dead, but reference is soon made to his mother’s young sister Agnes, who’d died recently after a final confinement to an institution. The young woman notices a disturbing physical resemblance between the young man and his supposed aunt, not present in the old woman introduced as ‘his mother’.
Three tales now shift the focus to the child’s point of view. ‘Queen of the Night’ ('Nattens dronning') has a fairytale quality to it of a mother dressing up as the titular queen and sharing with Grete her young child her anticipation of the annual Karneval street procession. Yet the father is contemptuous and cruel in his remarks about his wife’s appearance, and Grete is aware that the wig and the costume are made from cheap artificial materials that are rough or sharp, liable to cut. It’s a sad little vignette about a childhood and growing up, the tussle for power within marriage, about make-believe and economic reality. ‘One Morning in a Residential Neighborhood’ ('En morgen i et villakvarter') is about a family break-up seen from the child’s perspective, and about the subterfuges and lies that hurt everyone involved until the moment when the removal van arrives to part father, mother, daughter, son. A different kind of family break occurs in ‘A Nice Boy’ ('En flink dreng'): John, a helpful and eager to please youngster who’s been adopted by a childless couple, overhears part of a conversation between his foster mother and spiteful Mrs Petersen, during which he begins to doubt that he will be as loved and accepted now that his mother has unexpectedly produced a baby stepbrother.
‘Life’s Persistence’ ('Det stædige liv') features a woman in the waiting-room of a doctor’s clinic; it’s the old dilemma, she’s the married man’s lover, their relationship a secret from his wife and son, but will he feel the same if the reason she has secretly come to the seedy clinic tells her the outcome she fears? In the penultimate tale ‘Evening’ ('Aften') we’re told ‘Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,’ and it’s enough to make us anxious too, especially when we hear how, as in a previous tale, children are often the ones to suffer more, and for longer, than the parents when complexities of family marriages and re-marriages treat them like tug-of-war trophies. And finally, ‘Depression’ describes how Lulu has to cope not only with the imminent arrival of their second child but also Kai’s bipolar disorder, which switches from him being life and soul of the party to being unable to work and his seeming insensitivity to the effect it has on Lulu.
It’s clear that in The Umbrella Ditlevsen is drawing much on feelings and experiences she was familiar with in childhood and as an adult. The pieces credibly convey how life can look from both a child’s perspective and a woman’s: confusing and arbitrary, one’s wishes liable to be thwarted without warning, a single word, pause or phrase, or even a look, skewing the course of the rest of your life, a realisation that at the drop of a hat things can so easily never be the same again. Ditlevsen’s command of the short story is devastatingly evident here, effected not just by well-crafted prose and believable individuals but also by her understanding of how fables and parables are like jokes. The set-up, the steady build-up, and then the punchline, which allows you to comprehend exactly that this was where everything was leading up to: the turning-point, from which there’s no turning back.
This selection is extracted from the 2022 English language translation by Michael Favala Goldman, itself compiled from two of Ditlevsen’s short story collections; however, it consists only of The Umbrella collection from 1952, shorn of The Trouble with Happiness (1963). Incidentally, the original Danish of the second collection, Den Onde Lykke, could be more literally translated as ‘The Evil Happiness’, or more ambiguously as ‘The Evil Luck’; admittedly, ‘the trouble with happiness’ has a more poetic ring, apt since Michael Favala Goldman is himself a poet, much as Ditlevsen herself was.
Reflecting aspects of Ditlevsen’s own disturbed life, at different stages afflicted by alcohol and drug addiction, several divorces and eventual suicide in 1976, this is not a sequence to consider tackling if you’re looking for positive, uplifting reflections on life.
But that’s not a reason for giving it a wide berth: her skill in evoking the kinds of ordinary domestic scenes and situations that are universal, regardless of period and geography, is one to be savoured; and, in depicting the kinds of turning points in life that many of us may possibly recognise in retrospect, we can start to appreciate just how well Ditlevsen can suggest so much in so few words.
It’s those kinds of pivotal moments I want to focus on first. For example, in ‘The Umbrella’ ('Paraplyen') Helga has all her life looked for an indefinable something that would bring her contentedness, blotting out a sense of inadequacy and lack of fulfilment, an inadequacy reinforced in her childhood and now by marriage with Egon. Forced to fill the role of dutiful housewife in a Copenhagen flat she comes to believe the ownership of a yellow umbrella will bring her that happiness and fulfilment; but as a crisis in her marriage to Egon fast approaches will acquiring such an umbrella avert disaster or ameliorate matters? In similar fashion ‘The Cat’ ('Katten') touches on an acquisition, a stray feline which accepts food but, not being house-trained, is unwelcome as far as the man of the house is concerned. His humdrum marriage to Grete has settled into dull routine, but Grete’s whole focus is on this smelly cat. Matters come to a head when one of his attempts to banish it from the house prove he is no longer master of what he thinks of as his domain.
But it need not be a physical object that turns out to be a sliding-door moment. In ‘My wife doesn’t dance’ ('Min kone danser ikke') this chance remark in a phone conversation overheard by the wife could be the straw that breaks what, on the surface at least, seems to be an amiable-enough marriage. Her disability, caused by polio (what used to be called childhood or infantile paralysis), always meant certain social invitations were out of the question; to her future husband it was never a barrier to fondness and a wedded life, nor did he ever talk about it to her. Yet in this one instance it is as though she is living with a stranger, one who doesn’t know her, doesn’t understand her: inwardly she rages: “It’s over, she thought. Not yet, not tomorrow. Maybe he’ll never know it’s over.”
‘His Mother’ ('Hans mor') starts to change the template of troubled marriages by the tale of a young woman going with her young lover Asger to meet his aged mother, a crone-like figure who looks old enough to be his grandmother. The mother is surrounded by portraits of relatives both living and dead, but reference is soon made to his mother’s young sister Agnes, who’d died recently after a final confinement to an institution. The young woman notices a disturbing physical resemblance between the young man and his supposed aunt, not present in the old woman introduced as ‘his mother’.
Three tales now shift the focus to the child’s point of view. ‘Queen of the Night’ ('Nattens dronning') has a fairytale quality to it of a mother dressing up as the titular queen and sharing with Grete her young child her anticipation of the annual Karneval street procession. Yet the father is contemptuous and cruel in his remarks about his wife’s appearance, and Grete is aware that the wig and the costume are made from cheap artificial materials that are rough or sharp, liable to cut. It’s a sad little vignette about a childhood and growing up, the tussle for power within marriage, about make-believe and economic reality. ‘One Morning in a Residential Neighborhood’ ('En morgen i et villakvarter') is about a family break-up seen from the child’s perspective, and about the subterfuges and lies that hurt everyone involved until the moment when the removal van arrives to part father, mother, daughter, son. A different kind of family break occurs in ‘A Nice Boy’ ('En flink dreng'): John, a helpful and eager to please youngster who’s been adopted by a childless couple, overhears part of a conversation between his foster mother and spiteful Mrs Petersen, during which he begins to doubt that he will be as loved and accepted now that his mother has unexpectedly produced a baby stepbrother.
‘Life’s Persistence’ ('Det stædige liv') features a woman in the waiting-room of a doctor’s clinic; it’s the old dilemma, she’s the married man’s lover, their relationship a secret from his wife and son, but will he feel the same if the reason she has secretly come to the seedy clinic tells her the outcome she fears? In the penultimate tale ‘Evening’ ('Aften') we’re told ‘Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety,’ and it’s enough to make us anxious too, especially when we hear how, as in a previous tale, children are often the ones to suffer more, and for longer, than the parents when complexities of family marriages and re-marriages treat them like tug-of-war trophies. And finally, ‘Depression’ describes how Lulu has to cope not only with the imminent arrival of their second child but also Kai’s bipolar disorder, which switches from him being life and soul of the party to being unable to work and his seeming insensitivity to the effect it has on Lulu.
It’s clear that in The Umbrella Ditlevsen is drawing much on feelings and experiences she was familiar with in childhood and as an adult. The pieces credibly convey how life can look from both a child’s perspective and a woman’s: confusing and arbitrary, one’s wishes liable to be thwarted without warning, a single word, pause or phrase, or even a look, skewing the course of the rest of your life, a realisation that at the drop of a hat things can so easily never be the same again. Ditlevsen’s command of the short story is devastatingly evident here, effected not just by well-crafted prose and believable individuals but also by her understanding of how fables and parables are like jokes. The set-up, the steady build-up, and then the punchline, which allows you to comprehend exactly that this was where everything was leading up to: the turning-point, from which there’s no turning back.
This selection is extracted from the 2022 English language translation by Michael Favala Goldman, itself compiled from two of Ditlevsen’s short story collections; however, it consists only of The Umbrella collection from 1952, shorn of The Trouble with Happiness (1963). Incidentally, the original Danish of the second collection, Den Onde Lykke, could be more literally translated as ‘The Evil Happiness’, or more ambiguously as ‘The Evil Luck’; admittedly, ‘the trouble with happiness’ has a more poetic ring, apt since Michael Favala Goldman is himself a poet, much as Ditlevsen herself was.
August 30, 2025
Heart-shattering stories, specifically the ones about living up to female stereotypes and being constantly let down or disappointed.
September 9, 2025
dreams and desolation throughout.
January 24, 2026
one morning in a residential neighbourhood
January 15, 2026
ouch :(
short stories give you - 1HP/sec
short stories give you - 1HP/sec
July 15, 2025
Ditlevsen has a straightforward and almost detached writing voice, which is not to say that there are no emotions woven in between her words. That air of “what else can be done about it?” permeates every single story in this collection, of which, thematically, are composed of tales of disillusionment, the position of womanhood, and truly, the patriarch’s longstanding stiflement of a woman’s personhood. To say that these stories are commonly about a woman whose life is made harder by a man is not entirely inaccurate if overly simplistic, but Ditlevsen’s way of telling a story is compelling enough to make the retelling of an age old reality worth it.
April 27, 2025
The Umbrella begins with the introduction of our protagonist Helga, cited as 'always unreasonably expecting more from life than it could ever deliver!
There's something about the way Ditlevsen depicts women thats positioned so poignantly with my own sense of self.
An essential component in Tove's literature is bleak portrayals of ones potentional being somehow hemmed in and suffocated by those you're supposed to love. The Umbrella becomes a winding metaphor for Helga's marriage which, in its compliance to tradition, has had all of its enchantment and excitement depleted and replaced by mutual dissatisfaction.
I find Tove's writings effect on me interesting because I'm constantly split between an adoration of prose and perspective with a deep sense of doom, like all of her reflections on relationships are a direct mirror of my deepest fears. The short story in the last 20 pages was, too, exceptional and with a profound impact. I think its impact is in part because I can see my own family dynamics within it and because, again, it's a reflection of my own aversion to conventional commitment and its complacencies.
There's something about the way Ditlevsen depicts women thats positioned so poignantly with my own sense of self.
An essential component in Tove's literature is bleak portrayals of ones potentional being somehow hemmed in and suffocated by those you're supposed to love. The Umbrella becomes a winding metaphor for Helga's marriage which, in its compliance to tradition, has had all of its enchantment and excitement depleted and replaced by mutual dissatisfaction.
I find Tove's writings effect on me interesting because I'm constantly split between an adoration of prose and perspective with a deep sense of doom, like all of her reflections on relationships are a direct mirror of my deepest fears. The short story in the last 20 pages was, too, exceptional and with a profound impact. I think its impact is in part because I can see my own family dynamics within it and because, again, it's a reflection of my own aversion to conventional commitment and its complacencies.
June 9, 2025
I did like Tove D’s writing, it was precise, clinical and based on acute observation. This was a collection of short stories all about people who were broken in one way or another. And man it was bleak.
April 23, 2025
a study on sidelined desires
August 11, 2025
the umbrella, my wife doesn’t dance, and a nice boy were my favourites.
the stories that were told from the perspective of a child were surprisingly good! the pov is not one i usually enjoy but she allows the children to be unique and have distinct voices.
the stories that were told from the perspective of a child were surprisingly good! the pov is not one i usually enjoy but she allows the children to be unique and have distinct voices.
November 30, 2025
Toivon palaavani näiden novellien pariin. Ditlevsen kirjoittaa tarkasti!
December 27, 2025
Heartbreaking
September 29, 2025
Women have dealt and grown so accustomed to disappointment in relationships with men. Both heartbreaking and infuriating.
June 12, 2025
simple reading, unconfusing, and actually pretty sentences. if only Stephen could do the same
June 13, 2025
Oof. Despite the power of these stories, there isn't much emotional variety in this collection. It's surprisingly one-note, for an author who can clearly convey moments of crisis very well and selects her imagery with such care.
Ditlevsen chooses to portray broken marital or filial relationships in all of these stories. The imagery is, at times, very powerful. The title story in particular conveys unfulfilled desire with heartbreaking effectiveness.
I will not seek out more Ditlevsen in the future, though not because of anything I find lacking in her craft. She is quite deft at drawing out the long-term consequences of unmet desire in romantic relationships, and particularly what this does to women, but she operates on a consistent deficit of hope that unfortunately flattens her imaginative range.
Ditlevsen chooses to portray broken marital or filial relationships in all of these stories. The imagery is, at times, very powerful. The title story in particular conveys unfulfilled desire with heartbreaking effectiveness.
I will not seek out more Ditlevsen in the future, though not because of anything I find lacking in her craft. She is quite deft at drawing out the long-term consequences of unmet desire in romantic relationships, and particularly what this does to women, but she operates on a consistent deficit of hope that unfortunately flattens her imaginative range.
July 29, 2025
Purchased on a whim at Politikens Boghal in Copenhagen along with two others in the Penguin Classic series (it was 3 for 2, I had to). I'd read the Copenhagen trilogy earlier this year and really enjoyed it; it feels weird to say I "loved" it, based on the subject matter. I genuinely loved this, though.
Usually short story collections are hit or miss for me, but there wasn't one in this book I even liked less than the others. Quiet, domestic stories mostly about women (mothers, wives, daughters). Ditlevsen writes women with an autonomy that I'm not used to from that time (1940s-60s, though to be fair, it was Denmark), even when they are confined within their apartments, which almost all of them were. A really tender little collection of stories about domestic life in Copenhagen.
Usually short story collections are hit or miss for me, but there wasn't one in this book I even liked less than the others. Quiet, domestic stories mostly about women (mothers, wives, daughters). Ditlevsen writes women with an autonomy that I'm not used to from that time (1940s-60s, though to be fair, it was Denmark), even when they are confined within their apartments, which almost all of them were. A really tender little collection of stories about domestic life in Copenhagen.
November 8, 2025
first off:
-may these loves never find me
-may more books like this find me
Loved this book. I think those ineffable little pangs of emotion, the ones you feel so deeply but could never put into words, the ones that make you feel alive or like you’re dead, are so well elicited by the short stories in this collection. I saw parts of myself in every main character; I felt so Human but simultaneously like an amorphously emotional Being, inside the heads of people who are a little too Real.
Genuinely so phenomenal.
-may these loves never find me
-may more books like this find me
Loved this book. I think those ineffable little pangs of emotion, the ones you feel so deeply but could never put into words, the ones that make you feel alive or like you’re dead, are so well elicited by the short stories in this collection. I saw parts of myself in every main character; I felt so Human but simultaneously like an amorphously emotional Being, inside the heads of people who are a little too Real.
Genuinely so phenomenal.
September 1, 2025
I’m a complete sucker for these Penguin type things. A series of short novels, short stories all with a strong design theme. Chose this one as I’d read Ditlevsen earlier this year and loved her writing. These short stories all have a theme of disconnection, being broken psychologically; the bleakness undercut by the brilliance of the writing which kept me reading one afternoon until all 100 pages were done.
May 28, 2025
Women alone and oppressed in marriage and relationships. Guileless children confused by their parents words and deeds. Awkward social occasions and suppressed emotions.
Deftly delineated bitterness and sadness. Brief, sparse stories with heart rending endings.
Also this Penguin Archive series of shorter fiction is lovely.
Deftly delineated bitterness and sadness. Brief, sparse stories with heart rending endings.
Also this Penguin Archive series of shorter fiction is lovely.
June 16, 2025
Astute and skillful as always, though somewhat monotonous, and for some of the stories, forgettable. Somehow, I find it very sore and kind of sedated at the same time, as though a thin veil of numbness (Adulthood?) dims and neutralizes something initially personal and tender. Something striking still gleams through the veil occasionally. My favourite was Life’s Persistence.
June 14, 2025
Finely written and bleak short stories about unhappy marriages, silenced desires, neglected children, and poverty. Ditlevsen seems to specialize in focal characters that don't really understand what is going on.
August 16, 2025
I really enjoyed this short collection, including The Umbrella, My wife doesn't dance, the cat and others. Sadly one story I did not like. I do wish Penguin does publish more of her work, if I am correct that some are missing? if they do I buy right away.
December 27, 2025
Noem het gerust een collectie van huiselijke horrorverhalen, van situaties die dieptriest zijn, maar ook net aan draaglijk. De grootste tragedie is dat er aan het eind van ieder verhaal, eigenlijk helemaal niks is veranderd.
January 4, 2026
she has a way of writing from children's POVs that feels so unheard of and yet very familiar. It's like she's able to voice complex thoughts you could never put into words as an actual child.
lots of despair and unfulfillment in these stories, as in all of her writing. Still, beautiful
lots of despair and unfulfillment in these stories, as in all of her writing. Still, beautiful
July 14, 2025
Wat een bloedmooie droevenis
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews