The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl is a novel by American writer David Ebershoff, published in 2000 by the Viking Press in the United States and Allen & Unwin in Australia. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to undergo sex reassignment surgery. The author has stated that the novel does not try to tell a true story. Ebershoff not only imagined most of what he wrote about Elbe's inner life, but also fabricated all of the other characters in the book, most important among them Wegener's blue-blooded American-born wife, Gerda Wegener. In 2015, The Danish Girl was adapted into a film, directed by Tom Hooper.