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mother died. She then went for a time to the home of her brother 
Axel, who was first lieutenant in Randers and unmarried. 
In the meanwhile the father, now a retired officer, returned to 
Copenhagen and married in the autumn of 1845 Madame Christine 
Hailing, a woman of forty-four. Though she had every good wish 
in the world to win the children, she w T as not successful; they found 
her narrow-minded and thoroughly pleased with herself. However, 
Mathilde lived in her father’s house for three years while she fitted 
herself to be a teacher. In October, 1849, she took employment with 
a game-keeper in Lolland. 
She was there one year, and she alluded to it always as the only 
youthful period of her life. The nineteen-year-old girl flamed with 
enthusiasm for her native land—it was the year of Denmark’s great¬ 
ness,—she went about with the family, and was childishly happy at 
being pretty and noticeable, and having every one like her. On Sun¬ 
day she felt herself quite free, and very grand indeed in “a red gown 
with a black silk apron and white satin kerchief.” 
In the letters to her sister Anna, who also had the position of 
a governess, she touched on many things lightly and rapidly. Already 
she was full of the idea of Clara Raphael. Yet she did not speak of 
it directly, carried away though she was as she adventured the great 
step. “It absorbs me early and late,” she wrote, “but it is not clear 
enough to tell about in a letter. It is more an account of something 
which can be, rather than something that is.” Later on, however, 
she wrote: “My little myrtle hovers between life and death, and I 
watch over it as though it were a child. I have bound up a great hope 
with it, and christened it with a name. I shall not tell you any more, 
except that the name is a lady’s.” 
So the book was written: Clara Raphael , Twelve Letters. The 
letters are from Clara to her friend Mathilde—a whole little romance, 
and a young girl’s fight for woman’s spiritual freedom, with the right 
to develop herself in accordance with her own nature. No emancipa¬ 
tion in the practical sense of the word had she in her design; on the 
contrary she lets her heroine renounce in her affections a very noble 
young baron, and give him up—altogether for the sake of the cause. 
This last act was naturally a target for much scorn and derision 
among her adversaries. She herself also wrote about it later on: “I 
can no longer understand whence I received the odd idea of renounce¬ 
ment. In no place is it written that we shall sacrifice the temporal 
thing for the idea’s sake.” 
The manuscript of this book Mathilde Fibiger sent in the greatest 
secrecy to the poet Johan Ludvig Hej berg, begging him to give 
her his opinion and help her by word and deed. With anxiety she 
awaited the result. He j berg answered very kindly, and there now 
sprang up a correspondence between them, which afforded hap- 
