Although
her father was Norwegian, SIGRID UNDSET was
born in 1882 in the small town of Kalundborg in Denmark,
at the childhood home of her mother, Charlotte. She was the eldest of three daughters. She and
her family moved to Norway
when she was two.
She grew up
in the Norwegian capital, Oslo (or Kristiania, as it was known until 1925). When
she was only 11 years old, her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald
Martin Undset, died at the age of 40
after a long illness.
The
family's economic situation meant that Undset had to give up hope of a
university education and after a one-year secretarial course she obtained work
at the age of 16 as a secretary with an engineering company in Kristiania, a
post she was to hold for 10 years.
While
employed at office work, Sigrid wrote and studied. She was 16 years old
when she made her first attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages. At the age of 25, she made her literary debut with a short realistic novel
on adultery. It created a stir, and she found herself
ranked as a promising young author in Norway.
During the years up to
1919, she published a number of novels set in contemporary Kristiania, about
the city and its inhabitants. They are stories of working people, of trivial
family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children. Her main
subjects are women and their love. Or, as she herself put it - in her typically
curt and ironic manner
-"the immoral kind"
(of love).
Her books
sold well from the start, and, after the publication of her third book, she
left her office job and prepared to live on her income as a writer. Having been
granted a writer's scholarship, she set out on a lengthy journey in Europe. After short stops in Denmark
and Germany, she continued
to Italy, arriving in Rome in December 1909,
where she remained for nine months. In Rome,
she met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian
painter, whom she married almost three years later. She was 30 and he was
thirteen years older, married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. It was
nearly three years before Anders got his divorce from his first wife.
Sigrid and Anders were married in 1912 and went to stay in London for six months. From London,
they returned to Rome,
where their first child, a boy named after his father, was born in January 1913. In the years up to 1919, she had another child, and the household also
took in Ander's three children from his first marriage. These were difficult
years: her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, as was one of Ander's sons by his first wife.
She
continued writing, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories.
She also entered the public arena critical of emancipation as it was developing, and of the moral and
ethical decline she felt was threatening in the wake of the First World
War.
In 1919,
she moved to Lillehammer, a small town in the Gudbrand
Valley in southeast Norway, taking her two children
with her. She was then expecting her third child. The intention was that she
should take a rest at Lillehammer
and move back to Kristiania as soon as Anders had their new house in order.
However, the marriage broke down and a divorce followed. In August 1919, she
gave birth to her third child, at Lillehammer.
She decided to make Lillehammer
her home, and within two years, Bjerkebæk, a large house of traditional
Norwegian timber architecture, was completed, along with a large fenced garden
with views of the town and the villages around. Here she was able to retreat
and concentrate on her writing.
After the birth of her third child, and with a
secure roof over her head, Sigrid started what was to become her most beloved
work, Kristin Lavransdatter.
She had studied Old Norse manuscripts
and chronicles and visited and examined Medieval churches and monasteries,
both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was
portraying and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her
first novel about the Middle Ages.Both Sigrid's
parents were atheists and, although, in accord with the norm of the
day, she and her two younger sisters were baptized and with their mother
regularly attended the local Lutheran church,
the milieu in which they were raised was a thoroughly secular one. Sigrid spent much of her life as an agnostic, but marriage and the outbreak of the
First World War were to change her attitudes. During those difficult years she
experienced a crisis of faith, almost imperceptible at first, then increasingly
strong. The crisis led her from clear agnostic skepticism, with a painful uneasiness
about the ethical decline of the age, towards Christianity.
Beginning
around 1917, Sigrid developed a passionate interest in the writings of
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, many of whose writings she
was to translate into Norwegian. She was
received into the Catholic Church in November 1924, after
thorough instruction from the Catholic priest in her local parish. She was 42
years old. She subsequently became a Third Order Dominican.
In Norway, her conversion
to Catholicism was not only considered sensational, it was scandalous. It was
also noted abroad, where her name was becoming known through the international
success of Kristin Lavransdatter. At the time, there were very few practicing
Catholics in Norway,
which was an almost exclusively Lutheran country. Anti-Catholicism was
widespread not only among the Lutheran clergy, but through large sections of
the population. The attacks against her faith and character were quite
vicious at times, with the result that her literary gifts were aroused in response.
In all her writing, she shows an observant eye
for the mystery of life and for that which cannot be explained by reason or the
human intellect. At the back of her sober, almost brutal realism, there is
always an inkling of something unanswerable.
For many
years, she participated in the public debate, going out of her way to introduce
the ongoing Catholic literary revival into Norwegian literature. In response, she was
swiftly dubbed "The Mistress of Bjerkebæk" and "The Catholic
Lady".
Sigrid's
essays about Elizabethan era English Catholic martyrs Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell were collected and
published in Stages on the Road. Her Saga of Saints told
the whole of Norwegian history through the lives of
Norwegian Saints.
In May
1928, she travelled to England
and visited G.K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc,
both of whose writings she was later to translate into Norwegian.
Sigrid won
the 1928 Nobel
Prize in Literature, "principally for her powerful
descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages". At that time she
was translating Catholic books into Norwegian, including works by Monsignor
Robert Hugh Benson and G.K. Chesterton. She donated the money she received from
the Nobel Committee to families who were raising mentally disabled children.
When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Sigrid was
forced to flee as she had strongly criticized both Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler since
the early 1930s. Her books were banned in Nazi Germany and she knew her name was on a list of those to be rounded up in the
first wave of arrests. Not wishing to become a target of the Gestapo. She fled to neutral Sweden.Her eldest
son, Norwegian Army Second
Lieutenant Anders Svarstad, was killed in
action at the age of 27, in April 1940, while defending
Segalstad Bridge in Gausdal from German troops.
Her sick
daughter had died shortly before the outbreak of the war. Bjerkebæk was
requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, and used as officers' quarters
throughout the Occupation of Norway.
Her library
had already been secretly divided between her closest local friends. The books
were hidden at great risk throughout the Nazi occupation and were returned to
her after the Liberation of Norway.
In 1940, Sigrid
and her younger son left neutral Sweden then crossed the Soviet Union via
the Trans-Siberian Railroad before
arriving as a political refugee in the United States.
There, she untiringly pleaded occupied Norway's cause and the plight of
European Jews in writings, speeches and interviews. She lived in Brooklyn Heights, New York where she was active
in
St. Ansgar's
Scandinavian Catholic League, writing several articles for its
bulletin. She also traveled to Florida,
where she became a close friend of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings authorof The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Sigrid returned
to Norway
after the liberation in 1945. She lived another four years but never published
another word, dying at the age of67 in Lillehamer.
She was buried in the village of Mesnali,
15 kilometers east of Lillehammer,
where her daughter and the son who died in battle are remembered. The grave is
recognizable by three black crosses.
