Who was Sigrid Undset?

English-speakers are most likely to find author Sigrid Undset through her novel Kristin Lavransdatter. Part soap opera, part rich spiritual tome and family saga, the novel has been described as the best novel about marriage ever written. Whether or not you agree with that assessment, you’ll likely leave an encounter with Kristin Lavransdatter wondering about the author.

As a biographer described, “She is a great story-teller, with a profound and realistic knowledge of the labyrinths of the human mind – at all times and in all places. With her literary and historical expertise, acquired firsthand, her thorough knowledge of nature and her understanding of its significance for all of us, – Sigrid Undset has enormous riches, emotional and intellectual, to draw on.” The making of such a woman with such a mind is worth investigating

Undset was born in 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, in the childhood home of her Danish mother. Undset was the eldest of three daughters; when she was two the family moved to Kristiania, the capital of Norway, which was renamed Oslo in 1925. Throughout her childhood, Undset spent her summer vacations with her mother’s parents in Denmark.

According to some sources, if not for her father suddenly taking ill, Undset might have been born in Rome, Italy, where he was working. Her father, Ingvald Undset, was a well-known archaeologist and medievalist. His specialty was the Iron Age in Europe. His work was cut short by a severe illness, which some speculate may have been Parkinson’s, which took his life when Sigrid Undset was 11-years-old.

Undset commemorated her childhood and the influence of her father in her memoir 11 Years. Despite the relatively short time her father was alive and the severity of his illness, his expertise and scholarship made a deep impression on Undset that lasted a lifetime. The historical accuracy of her Medieval settings are informed in part by the passionate and knowledgeable interest her father conveyed.

With her mother she shared a love of Danish literature and fold songs. Her mother was also fluent in several languages and intimately involved with Ingvald Undset’s archaeological work. The family was atheist, though the girls were baptized into the Lutheran church and even regularly attended as a matter of social form.

Following her father’s death, Undset’s mother had to care for the three girls on a small pension. This precluded the possibility of advanced education for Undset. At age 16, after a one-year typing course, Undset took a secretarial role at a German-owned engineering business in Kristiania. Though she disliked the work, Undset stayed in the position for 10 years, developing organizational skills and typing ability, which aided her in her later home management and lengthy writing projects.

Already at age 16, Undset attempted to write. She began with a draft of a novel that took place in a Medieval setting, a theme to which she would later return. By 22, while still working as a secretary, she submitted a manuscript, which was rejected by publishers. Following rejection, Undset took a different approach to writing and instead of a historical work, she turned to the everyday lives of nameless urban denizens, their hopes and romances.

At age 25, Undset was a published author with the novel Fru Marta Oulie. The opening sentence reads: “I have been unfaithful to my husband,” an admission that caused scandal in Kristiania. As ever, that type of scandal sells, and Undset was on her way to literary success.

From the beginning, her novels sold well, and Undset was able to leave her secretarial position. In 1909, she was awarded a travel scholarship from the Norwegian government. Using these funds, Undset traveled to, among other places, the city in which she was almost born: Rome. Accounts indicate she experienced a kind of rebirth, becoming more outgoing and forming close relationships with the circle of Scandinavian artists in Rome.

In this milieu, Undset met the artist Anders C. Svarstad. Older and already married with three children, Svarstad was off limits. However, within three years of meeting, Svarstad divorced his wife and married Undset. The couple then stayed in London where Svarstad was painting and Undset became more immersed in English literary traditions.

Undset’s first son, Anders (named after his father), was born in 1913 in Rome. After that, Undset gave birth to a daughter who suffered from some form of mental handicap and fragile health for her whole life. In 1919, Undset gave birth to her third child, a son, in Lillehammer, Norway. By this time, her marriage had deteriorated to the point of divorce and she built her own home where she lived and wrote with her children.

The years of bearing children were busy ones. Undset managed a household with frequent guests and much activity. Upon learning that her husband’s first wife had placed her three children in an orphanage, Undset took the children in, one of whom also had special needs, and cared for them. Amidst all this, she continued to write.

After settling in Lillehammer, where she remained for more than 20 years, Undset had an impressive outpouring of literary material. She wrote the three-volume Kristin Lavransdatter and another four-volume work that takes place in Medieval Norway, Olav Audunsson. Undset became Catholic, an eccentric choice in thoroughly Protestant Norway, and increasingly her writing reflected her faith.

In this period of extraordinary literary accomplishment, Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. She also continued to write essays, some of which brough the censure of the Nazi government. Her works were banned in Germany. Fearing for her safety, she fled occupied Norway in 1940. As she fled she learned that her eldest son had been killed in combat close to the family home. Her daughter had already died.

The exile, in which she and her youngest son eventually traveled to the United States, has been described as an experience that broke Undset. She tirelessly advocated for Norway and condemned the Nazis, but she never again completed a novel. She returned to Lillehammer in 1945 and lived for another four years.

From the time of original publication, many of Undset’s novels have been continually published and find new readers into the present day. Tina Nunally’s excellent translation of Kristin Lavransdatter published in 2005 has made this classic a favorite of book clubs. In Norway she is still a towering literary great. She is depicted on the 500 kroner banknote and its two kroner postage stamp.

In Undset’s life we see a woman of extraordinary ability paired with inexhaustible endurance. Her transformation from atheist to zealous Roman Catholic may seem inconsistent except for the common thread of intent observation and boundless passion.  Gidske Anderson aptly wrote, “In all her writing one senses an observant eye for the mystery of life, for that which cannot be explained either by reason or common sense. At the back of her sober, almost brutal realism, there is always an inkling of something unanswerable.”