This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White and Paul Rouse. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 14 February 1891, Denmark
Died: 15 January 1983
Country most active: United States, Ireland
Also known as: NA
Signe Toksvig (1891–1983), novelist, biographer, and diarist, was one of two daughters and two sons of P. K. Toksvig, of Jutland peasant stock, editor of a Danish provincial newspaper, and Marie Toksvig. At age 15 she emigrated with the family to America, where her father, frustrated in efforts to establish a newspaper for Danish immigrants, worked at various odd jobs, becoming a grinder of lenses for spectacles. After secondary-level education in Troy, New York, she studied on scholarship at Cornell University, graduating in 1916. She worked for Vogue magazine before joining the New Republic, of which she eventually became an associate editor. Throughout her career she wrote solely in English, her fiction including short stories published mostly in American periodicals, and four novels: The last devil (1927), Eve’s doctor (1937), Port of refuge (1938), and Life boat (1941). Sharing Hackett’s alienation from the prevailing social ethos of Ireland, she particularly objected to the country’s religiosity, provincialism, poverty, and shabby gentility. Her banned novel Eve’s doctor is a harrowing critique of the influence of catholic ethical teaching on Irish obstetric and gynaecological practice, and of Irish indulgence of clientelism and mediocrity. The protagonist, a humane and liberal-minded surgeon, is based on Bethel Solomons, the Jewish master of the Rotunda maternity hospital, whom Toksvig knew through her and Hackett’s friendship with Solomons’s sister Estella and her poet husband Seumas O’Sullivan, editor of the Dublin Magazine; the novel’s romantic interest reflects Toksvig’s own, largely unreciprocated, attraction to Solomons. Her non-fiction journalism was written primarily for American periodicals; during the second world war she edited a fortnightly news bulletin on the Danish resistance. Her best work, like that of her husband, was contained in biographies, of which she wrote two: The life of Hans Christian Andersen (1933), translated into every Scandinavian language and long adjudged the best work on the subject available in English, and Emanuel Swedenborg: scientist and mystic (1948). Her research on the latter stimulated an interest in spiritualism that led to her editing Swan on a black sea: a study in automatic writing (1965), transcriptions of scripts purportedly transmitted through the Irish medium Geraldine Cummins. She and Hackett collaborated on an unpublished dual autobiography, ‘Free lances’. Spending her last years in a nursing home, she remained intellectually alert till her death in Denmark in 1983. The posthumous publication Signe Toksvig’s Irish diaries 1926–1937 (1994), compiled by Lis Pihl from holdings in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, while a wryly entertaining observation of the Ireland of the period as viewed by a gifted ethnic and ideological alien, also reveals the dogmatic, humourless, and opinionated aspects of the author’s character.