Signe Toksvig



Signe Toksvig (1891–1983) was a Danish writer. Her articles were published in The New York Times, the Nation, The Atlantic, and other periodicals. She also published several books, including biographies of Hans Christian Andersen and Emanuel Swedenborg. Her life and work, and obstacles she encountered, has also been the focus of scholarship by others. All her writings were in English.

She is the great aunt of Sandi Toksvig.

Life


At age 14, Toksvig emigrated with her family from Denmark to the United States. She graduated from Cornell in 1916, and then worked as an assistant editor at The New Republic. In 1918, she married the journal's founder, Francis Hackett, an Irish writer and literary critic. They moved to Ireland in 1926 and lived there until 1937, when they moved to Denmark. They spent the Second World War in the United States, but returned to Europe and Denmark in the 1950s.

During her senior year at Cornell, she was the editor-in-chief (and one of the founders) of the student publication The Cornell Women's Review. She was also a member of Der Hexenkreis, the USA's first honor society founded for women, by women. Der Hexenkreis was founded in 1892 and became coeducational in 1970.

In 1943 she and her husband lived in Newton, Connecticut and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year 1943–1944. The fellowship supported her work on her biography of Emanuel Swedenborg. The goal of the biography was "to interpret the kind of man he was, with some reference to his scientific achievements but with special emphasis on his ideas concerning human survival after death, linked to a comparison of modern ideas on the same subject, and to be written from a nontheological point of view."