Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset was born in 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark, at her mother’s childhood home; her father, Ingvald Undset, was a Norwegian archaeologist, and the family moved to Kristiania (now Oslo) when she was two. His death when she was eleven left the household short of money, and instead of going to university she took a secretarial course and, at sixteen, a post with an engineering firm that she held — and detested — for ten years. In the evenings she wrote, attempting a medieval novel in her teens that publishers turned down.

She made her debut in 1907 with a short realist novel about adultery in contemporary Kristiania, and over the following years wrote sharply observed fiction about women in the modern city, culminating in Jenny (1911). In Rome she met the painter Anders Castus Svarstad, whom she married; later she settled at Lillehammer in Bjerkebæk, a traditional timber house. There she wrote Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22), which follows a woman of fourteenth-century Norway from childhood to death, and the four-volume The Master of Hestviken (1925–27). Grounded in close study of Old Norse sources and medieval chronicles, they bring a modern psychological depth to questions of love, conscience and faith. In 1924 she was received into the Catholic Church, a conversion that caused a sensation in Lutheran Norway.

Undset received the Nobel Prize in 1928. In 1940 she gave her prize to the Finnish war effort; that April Germany invaded Norway, her eldest son was killed in the fighting, and she fled to the United States, speaking against Nazism until her return in 1945. She died in Lillehammer in 1949.