MRS. SIGRID UNDSET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20475, 29 January 1930, Page 7

MRS. SIGRID UNDSET.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER. Mrs. Sigrid Undset, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1882. Her mother was a Dane, her father the famous Norwegian archaeologist, Dr. Ingvald Undset. She married Anders Svarsted, a well-known Norwegian artist, and has four children. She is a simple woman, with a plain view of life, living in the Lillehammer Valley in Eastern Norway in a restored, ancient house far away from the life of the city, and a very substantial sum of the Nobel Prize she has already allotted to the assistance of the poor mothers of mentally deficient children. As a girl she acted as secretary to her father, gaining thereby much knowledge of the medieval times which were eventually to figure so largely in hqr work. The appearance of " Kristin Lavransdatter " in Norway in 1920 called attention to her work, and she began to be freely mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Literature Prize. The first volume of this trilogy, " The Bridal Wreath," appeared in English in America in 1923; the second, " The Mistress of Husaby," in 1925; and "The Cross" in 1927. The trilogy is the fruit of her long and comprehensive study of Norwegian history in the fourteenth and earlier centuries, and to these people from a bleaker age she has .applied the modern psychological method—in other words, she has discovered that human nature is very much the same in essentials to-day as yesterday, and the day before yesterday. It was courageous of her to proceed in an historical novel upon this truism. Yet it gives to her characters back there in the past a vitality that is unforgettable, and, too, a definite significance. She lias also written two volumes of a new tetralogy, " The Axe and " The Snake Pit."