Sigrid Undset

Norwegian · 1882 to 1949

Born on May 20, 1882, in the small Danish town of Kalundborg at the childhood home of her mother Charlotte, Sigrid was the eldest daughter of the eminent Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Undset and was carried to Norway at two years old. She grew up in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, surrounded by her father's medieval manuscripts, Iron Age finds, and his deep enthusiasm for the sagas. He died at forty when she was eleven, ending the family's prospects of a university education and obliging her, at sixteen, after a one-year secretarial course, to take a clerk's post at a German engineering firm in Kristiania, where she sat for ten years and quietly began to write. Her debut, the slim novel Fru Marta Oulie (1907), opened with the line "I have been unfaithful to my husband" and made her name overnight in Norwegian letters. She married the painter Anders Castus Svarstad in 1912, bore him three children, the second of them disabled, and watched the marriage collapse in the years after the First World War. From the timber house Bjerkebæk at Lillehammer came her gathering of medieval research into Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-1922), a trilogy following a Norwegian woman from girlhood to death in the fourteenth century, and the four-volume Olav Audunssøn (1925-1927). In 1924 she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, principally for Kristin Lavransdatter. She fled the Nazi invasion in 1940 by way of Sweden and Russia to New York, broadcasting against Hitler from American radio. She returned to Lillehammer after the war and died there on June 10, 1949, at the age of sixty-seven.