Matchless: An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen’s Classic The Little Match Girl

Each year, National Public Radio asks a writer to compose a story with a Christmas theme. In 2008, Gregory Maguire offered a new twist on a classic tale, reinventing the Hans Christian Andersen classic The Little Match Girl.

When the story was first translated from Danish and published in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the Little Match Girl’s dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven were often interpreted as metaphors of religious salvation. In Matchless, Maguire adds a different dimension to the story, intertwining the match girl’s tale with that of a young boy, Frederik, whose own yearnings are the catalyst for a better future for himself and his family. Maguire uses his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen’s original intentions, and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the continuity that links the living and the dead.