Karin Michaëlis (1872-1950) was a Danish writer who exposed the constraints and abysses of her time with an unflinching eye. Born in Randers, she grew up in a bourgeois, strictly regimented environment that sharpened her sense of social injustice at an early age. She achieved international fame with The Dangerous Age (1910), a courageous novel about the existential crisis of a woman going through the menopause. In the 1920s, her house on the island of Thurø became a refuge for intellectuals and politically persecuted people, including Bertolt Brecht, Maria Lazar and other exiles from the Nazi regime. But when the Germans occupied Denmark in 1940, she herself had to flee. She escaped to the USA, where her fame faded. In 1946, she returned to Denmark penniless. The once celebrated author died forgotten and impoverished in 1950.