Looking for the Restless Soul of Nella Larsen in Copenhagen

When Helga Crane, the main character in Nella Larsen’s novel “Quicksand,” walked through the streets of Copenhagen, people were amazed. “Her dark, alien appearance was to most people an astonishment,” wrote Larsen, an acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author. “Some stared surreptitiously, some openly, and some stopped dead in front of her in order more fully to profit by their stares.”

More than 90 years after the publication of “Quicksand,” Larsen’s 1928 novel about a mixed-race woman’s unsuccessful journey to find her place in the world, a Black person might not receive a second glance exploring the Danish capital, which has seen a marked rise in the number of immigrants, including from Africa and the Middle East. While some things have changed drastically, many of the sights that Larsen’s fictional Helga Crane came across in Copenhagen remain much the same.

The cyclists crisscrossing the city are as ubiquitous today as they were when Helga learned to dodge the “innumerable bicycles like a true Copenhagener,” as is the city’s striking and colorful architecture. (UNESCO named it the World Capital of Architecture in 2023.) Denmark has often been ranked among the happiest countries in the world.

Larsen never explicitly wrote about her own day-to-day activities in Copenhagen. But biographers and critics have long regarded “Quicksand” as a semi-autobiographical work. That view was reinforced by revelations about Larsen’s life in Denmark. One of Larsen’s biographers, George Hutchinson, uncovered a passenger manifest that recorded Larsen’s travel from Denmark, and a Danish genealogist, Shari Jensen, discovered that Larsen’s relatives lived in Copenhagen at the same address as the relatives of the fictional Helga.

The novelist, born to immigrant parents, Mary Hanson, from Denmark, and Peter Walker, from the Danish West Indies, had lived in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Her mother later remarried a white Dane, and Larsen was raised in a white Danish household in Chicago, a rapidly growing and increasingly segregated city. Larsen spent years in Denmark as a child and then as a teenager and young adult. In 1912, she returned to the United States and later wrote “Quicksand,” her first novel, with its middle section devoted to Copenhagen. Published by the respected Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in 1928, the book was widely reviewed, including in The New York Times. W.E.B. DuBois, the sociologist and leading Black activist of the Harlem Renaissance era, praised it as “a fine, thoughtful and courageous piece of work.”