I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light.

His literary goals were shared by many authors among them the Norwegian realist playwright Henrik Ibsen. In his critical work which extended over a wider field than that of any other living writer Brandes was aided by a singularly charming style lucid and reasonable enthusiastic without extravagance brilliant and colored without affectation. Victoria Benedictsson committed suicide in a Copenhagen hotel room and the relationship with Brandes has later been blamed as the cause for the death.

He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Breakthrough" of Scandinavian culture. In 1884 Viggo Hørup Georg Brandes and his brother Edvard Brandes started the daily newspaper Politiken with the motto: "The paper of greater enlightenment".