Sigrid Undset

Jenny (1911) is a novel by Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset. Published during the author's social realist phase, a period in which her writing focused on the lives of everyday Norwegians, Jenny is a moving portrait of idealism and ambition and a tragic tale of talent gone to seed. Although Undset's later fiction-inspired by her conversion to Catholicism-won her the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, her earlier work has remained essential to her legacy. Finding...

First published in 1921, "The Wife" is the second book in the "Kristin Lavransdatter" trilogy by Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian author and winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature. Undset's award was primarily based on this series, which depicts the life of Norwegian woman from her childhood to her death in the 14th century. The first book in the series, "The Wreath", follows the young Kristin as she clashes with her family, who are religious and...

First published in the US by Alfred A. Knopf in 1928 in this English translation by A. G. Chater, now public domain. Set in 13th-century Norway, The Axe is the first volume in Undset's epic tetralogy, The Master of Hestviken. In it, we meet Olav Audunsson and Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter, who were betrothed as children and raised as brother and sister. In the heedlessness of youth, they become lovers, unaware that their ardor will forge the first link...

The narrative of a woman's life in fourteenth-century Norway as she reconstructs her world after the devastation of the Black Death and the loss of almost everything that she has loved.

"Olav settles in at his ancestral estate and soon brings Ingunn home as his wife. Both hope to put their troubles behind them, but the crimes and shameful secrets of the past have a long reach and tenacious hold. The consequences of sin, suspicion, and familial obligations may prove a greater threat to the pair's happiness than even their long years of separation"--