Women Of Interest

Southland Times, Issue 22487, 24 November 1934, Page 16

Women Of Interest

' . I SIGKID UNDSET. \ NORWEGIAN NOVELIST. (Number 16.) Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian writer, was born in 1882 at Kallundborg, Denmark. Her father was the well known Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Undset, Director of the National Museum at Oslo, who specialized in early Teutonic researches and was the first to explain the Norse animal ornamentations. He died early, leaving his family in poverty. From 1899 to 1909 his daughter had to earn her living as clerk to an electrical firm.

Menwhile however she had begun to write. Her first stories, “Martha Oulie” and “The Happy Age” (1907-8), show that she had already a remarkable faculty for. depicting feminine character, but they attracted no particular attention. . She became better known through her novel “Jenny” which appeared in 1911. Several volumes of legends and children’s stories followed and in 1919 the 1 book “From a Woman’s Point of View” in which she repudiated the views of the militant feminists with whom she had earlier shown some sympathy. Between 1920 and 1922 appeared her most notable work, the trilogy of novels, “Kristin Lavransdatter,” which deals with the destinies of a Norwegian woman. The setting is in the fourteenth century, but the characters are quite modem. This book had an enormous vogue in Norway where with a population of 2,600,000 an edition of 200,000 copies was called for. In 1925 Sigrid Undset issued a two-volume novel, “Olaf Audunsson of Hestoiken, the hero of which is the male counterpart of Kristin. The novelist, who lives at Lillehammer, Norway, married the painter C. A. Svarstad and has three children.