Modernism was a well-established and much-discussed trend in Danish postwar literature by the time Dorrit Willumsen made her debut in 1965 with Knagen: Noveller (The Peg: Stories). These short stories, with their themes of alienation and their criticism of modern life, were well in keeping with the concerns of experimental literature. At the same time, it was evident that the young author had something new to contribute, in terms of both style and theme. The stories in Knagen exposed specific aspects of alienation and reification in the welfare society, especially because Willumsen used the point of view of both women and children in a surprisingly new way. The attempt of modernist literature to articulate gender, the body, and the unconscious became an important catalyst for those few, but artistically significant, female modernists in Danish literature during the 1960s. As an author, Willumsen won a place at the forefront among...