Man Into Woman : An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex

NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1933. First edition. xiii, 288pp; frontis; b&w plates. Blue cloth; lacking a jacket. Wear and fraying at spine ends and tips; cloth somewhat sunned; spine gilt dulled but legible. Good, with sound binding and all plates present.

First American edition of this autobiographical memoir documenting the transition of Danish painter Lili Elbe (1882-1931), widely recognized as one of the first recipients of gender affirming surgery, whose life was the basis of the 2000 David Ebershoff novel The Danish Girl, as well as the 2015 film adaptation of the same name. Originally published in Danish in 1931, Man Into Woman consists of Elbe's own diary entries, which  were arranged in the wake of her premature death (presumably with some literary license) by her friend Ernst Ludwig Hathorn Jacobson, here credited pseudonymously as Niels Hoyer. As in the British and American firsts of 1933, this translation is by H. J. Stenning from the German edition, and introduced by Norman Haire.