ABSTRACT
At the age of twenty-five, the philosopher, theologian and novelist Søren Aabye Kierkegaard fell in love with a beautiful young woman, ten years his junior. Having completed his theological studies in 1840, he traveled to Jutland to visit the birthplace of his father, who had died two years earlier. This sojourn to Jutland seems to have moved him greatly. On his return to Copenhagen, the twenty-seven-year-old Kierkegaard impulsively offered his hand in marriage to Regine Olsen, the daughter of a well-to-do statesman, Terkild. Despite a certain awkwardness at first, Regine returned his affection, and since her father consented, Regine accepted, and it looked as if, in the ordinary scheme of things, the lovers would marry. But, as Kierkegaard records in his journal, events would not unfold in the ordinary way: “inwardly; the next day I saw that I had made a false step. A penitent such as I was my vita ante acta, my melancholy, that was enough. I suffered unspeakably at that time” (Journals 92).
