Johanne Luise Heiberg rose from obscurity, a harrowing childhood, and extreme poverty to become the preeminent actress of her day at Det Kongelige Teater (the Royal Theatre), Copenhagen. In addition to her many stage roles, Heiberg took on the role of exponent for the literary aesthetics of her husband--critic, playwright, and poet Johan Heiberg--and of his mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, also an author. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Thomasine Gyllembourg and Johan Heiberg set the cultural tone, and, by marrying into the tightly connected unit of mother and son, Johanne Luise Heiberg was expected to echo Heiberg taste and form, to maintain a certain reserve, and to hold her own passions in check. She consistently did so in everyday life, living an illusion of harmony that obscured her own individuality and replaced her emotional self--the self glimpsed in Et Liv gjenoplevet i Erindringen (A Life Relived...