Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition

In 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries to live as Lili Ilse Elvenes (more commonly known as Lili Elbe). Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man to Woman), published in Copenhagen in 1931, is the first popular full-length (auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung).

In Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer present the full text of the 1933 American edition of Elbe's work with comprehensive notes on textual and paratextual variants across the four published editions in three languages. This edition also includes a substantial scholarly introduction which situates the historical and intellectual context of Elbe's work, as well as new essays on the work by leading scholars in transgender studies and modernist literature, and critical coverage of the 2015 biopic, The Danish Girl.

This print edition has a digital companion: the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). Launched on July 6, 2019, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Institut f r Sexualwissenschaft) where Lili Elbe was initially examined, the Lili Elbe Digital Archive hosts the German typescript and all four editions of this narrative published in Danish, German, and English between 1931 and 1933, with English translations of the Danish edition and the typescript. Many letters from archives and contemporaneous articles noted in this print edition may be found in the digital archive.

Lili Ilse Elvenes (Lili Elbe), born in Denmark as Einar Wegener, died in Dresden in September 1931.

Pamela L Caughie, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, USA, is a senior modernist scholar and gender theorist. She is founder and co-director of the Modernist Networks digital consortium and a coeditor of Woolf Online, a digital archive of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. Her most recent books include, as editor, Disciplining Modernism (2009) and Virginia Woolf Writing the World (2015).

Sabine Meyer is a postdoc scholar at the Department of Northern European Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She was a research consultant for the 2015 film The Danish Girl and author of the most comprehensive book on Elbe to date, ＂Wie Lili zu einem richtigen Mädchen wurde＂ - Lili Elbe: Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Identität zwischen Medialisierung, Regulierung und Subjektivierung (2015).