Hans Christian Andersen: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1805 to 1875
Quick answer: Hans Christian Andersen craft file: the tale told in a speaking voice, the object with feelings, the ending that refuses comfort, and which tales to read first.
Quick facts
- Born: 1805, Odense, Denmark
- Died: 1875, near Copenhagen, aged 70
- Wrote in: Danish
- Known for: "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Match Girl"
- Signature move: An object or animal given a full inner life, then denied a happy ending
- Start with: "The Little Match Girl" (1845), three pages
Andersen wrote more than 150 tales over forty years, and unlike the Grimms he made most of them up. He took the speaking voice of the folk tale, the voice of someone telling a story to a child on their knee, and used it to say things folk tales do not say: that goodness is not rewarded, that the artist's gift is thrown away, that the poor child dies in the snow.
What he actually does on the page
He tells the tale as if aloud. The sentences are short, the asides are direct, the narrator says things like now listen, and the reader hears a voice in a room. "The Princess and the Pea" (1835) is barely a page and reads as spoken, with the twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns counted out like a joke. The voice is Andersen's great invention, and it lets him carry the darkest material without ever sounding grim.
He gives full feelings to things. The tin soldier with one leg in "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (1838) loves a paper dancer and ends in the stove; the fir tree in "The Fir Tree" (1844) spends its whole life wanting to be somewhere else and is chopped up in a yard. He writes objects the way other writers write people, with wants that cannot be met, and the reader who is nine feels it as truth.
He refuses the happy ending when the story does not deserve one. "The Little Mermaid" (1837) gives up her voice and her tail for a prince who marries someone else, and dissolves into foam. "The Little Match Girl" (1845) strikes her matches one by one on New Year's Eve, sees a stove, a goose, a Christmas tree and her dead grandmother, and is found frozen in the morning with a smile. Andersen's consolations, the daughters of the air, the grandmother in heaven, are offered to the child reader and withheld from the adult one.
The signature move
The object that feels, and then is denied, is best dissected in "The Little Match Girl". The structure is a sequence of matches: each strike buys a vision, each vision is larger than the last, and each goes out. The girl has no name and one fact of biography: her father will beat her if she comes home with nothing sold. The visions are described with the pleasure of a child's wish list and the matches with the accuracy of someone who knows how fast they burn. Then the morning: the townspeople see a dead child and say she tried to warm herself, and the narrator tells the reader that nobody knew what beautiful things she had seen. Two audiences read that last sentence, and they read two different stories. That is the trick, and it has never been improved on.
Stories to read first
Eight tales, from one page to forty.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the tales.
What not to copy
The piety. Andersen's heaven is offered too readily as a settlement in some tales, and the Christian frame that lifts the match girl and the mermaid can read as an author declining to face what he has written. The sentiment can be thick. Take the spoken voice, the feeling object and the double ending; supply your own afterlife or none.
Life at a glance
- 1805: Born in Odense, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman
- 1819: Arrives in Copenhagen at fourteen hoping for a life in the theatre
- 1835: First booklet of Fairy Tales Told for Children, with "The Tinderbox" and "The Princess and the Pea"; his novel The Improvisatore the same year
- 1837: "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes"
- 1843: "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Nightingale"
- 1844: "The Snow Queen"
- 1845: "The Little Match Girl"
- 1875: Dies at a friend's house outside Copenhagen
What writers can take from this
- Write as if speaking to one listener.
- Give an object one want and one death.
- Structure by repetition with rising visions.
- Let the ending console one reader and not the other.
- Never soften the death; soften only the voice that tells it.
Try it yourself
Choose one object in your kitchen and give it a single wish it cannot have. Write its life in under 800 words in the voice of someone telling a story to a child, aside and all. It must not get the wish. The last sentence must be one a child hears as comfort and an adult hears as the truth.
Questions
What is Hans Christian Andersen's best short story?
"The Little Mermaid" (1837) and "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837) are the most famous. "The Little Match Girl" (1845) and "The Snow Queen" (1844) are the ones critics and writers most often rank first.
How did Andersen influence the short story?
He invented the literary fairy tale as a form for original stories rather than retellings, and gave it a speaking voice and unhappy endings. Oscar Wilde's tales, much of Kafka's animal fiction and the whole of modern children's literature start from him.
Is Andersen hard to read?
No. The tales are written to be read aloud to children and most take under ten minutes. Choose a translation from the Danish (Tiina Nunnally's or Jean Hersholt's) rather than the Victorian versions, which soften him.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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