Jenny [Paperback]

Sigrid Undset (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

When Jenny was published in 1911, Undset found herself called immoral — “this is a side of the free, artistic life that the vast majority of citizens would rather not know.” The novel tells the story of Jenny Winge, a talented Norwegian painter who goes to Rome to seek artistic inspiration but ultimately betrays her own ambitions and ideals. After falling into an affair with the married father of a would-be suitor, Jenny has a baby out-of- wedlock and decides to raise the child on her own. Undset’s portrayal of a woman struggling toward independence and fulfillment is written with an unflinching, clear-eyed honesty that renders her story as compelling today as it was nearly a century ago.

This new translation by Tiina Nunnally captures the fresh, vivid style of Undset’s writing and restores passages omitted from the only previous edition to appear in English, which was published in 1921. Most famous for her later, historical fiction set in Catholic, medieval Scandinavia, Undset stands revealed with Jenny, her first major novel, as an unsparing, compassionate, magnificent realist, the creator of works that are at once thoroughly modern and of enduring interest.

“[Undset] was an uncommonly fine writer of fiction.”-- The New York Times Book Review

“Jenny is a stunningly atmospheric yet frank and searching drama about a young woman painter struggling to reconcile her need to make art with her longing for and fear of love. This brooding book can stand with the best of the moderns.”-- Booklist

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

SIGRID UNDSET won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Her early novels portrayed modern women “sympathetically but with merciless truthfulness”; her later works, including the internationally bestselling Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, contained “powerful pictures of Northern life in medieval times.”
TIINA NUNNALLY won the 2001 pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for her translation of the Penguin Classics Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy. She lives in Seattle.

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158642050X
• ISBN-13: 978-1586420505
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #465,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Early Undset novel, July 13, 2003

By 

Extollager (Mayville, ND United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jenny (Paperback)

Later, Sigrid Undset would become a peer of Dostoevsky -- see Mitzi Brunsdale's comments on Undset's magnificent quartet, The Master of Hestviken, in her 1988 study. But Undset's early novel Jenny shows the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner as the peer of Turgenev. Jenny is worthy of comparison with something like Turgenev's "First Love" as a tale of the loss of youth and of eros (present or absent), but from the point of view of a woman who is not in love, rather than the point of view of the man who is in love. There is a suggestion, too, of Turgenev's characteristic interest in cultured, somewhat amoral, and vaguely political artist-poet types who have left their northern homelands (for Turgenev, Russia; for Undset, Norway) for southern Europe.

Emphatically Jenny is not to be thought of as a Turgenev imitation, though. For one thing, Undset's novel deals -- in some of its best pages -- with its heroine's maternal yearnings and grief, something one wouldn't look for in Turgenev. The Russian had a somewhat effeminate fondness for poetic melancholy (amusing satirized by Dostoevsky in Demons); in Jenny, "might have been" hurts people more.

There are flat patches of descriptive writing -- here, she is no rival of the Turgenev who wrote the lovely outdoors anecdote "Bezhin Meadow" -- and one must admit that one could become impatient with these rootless would-be artists, as one was meant to, I suppose. In later works, Undset achieved a greater synthesis of romanticism and stern, classical truthfulness.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surprised Oprah Hasn't Picked This One, May 6, 2009

By 

Melissa McCauley (North Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jenny (Paperback)

Because JENNY is horribly dark and depressing. The setting is Rome, around 1905-1910, and Jenny Winge is a beautiful, blonde, twenty-something painter. The reserved Jenny hangs out with a lively, bohemian crowd of fellow artists, including her special friend and roommate, Fransiska (Cesca) Jahrmann. Enter Helge Gram, a somewhat dorky fellow Norwegian, who latches onto Jenny. Her friends protest, but eventually come to accept him because of Jenny's love-me-love-my-dog attitude.

Jenny and Cesca have many discussions about their choices in life, namely to be 1) a spinster righteously dedicated to her artistic work 2) a fallen woman, because nice girls don't, or 3) a shrewish housewife who has no life of her own and slaves for her husband.

Jenny eventually succumbs to Helge's smothering attention, becoming engaged to him, but never following through with a sexual relationship. They return home to Norway, where Jenny meets his horribly dysfunctional parents, and the strain of the insanity and lies ends their relationship.

Then, worried that she is frigid and perhaps looking for a father figure, Jenny becomes involved in a sexual relationship with Helge's father, Gert Gram.(!) Jenny gets pregnant and moves to a rooming house in Germany to have the baby in secret.

The baby dies after six weeks, and Jenny enters a spiral of depression. Even moving back to Rome does not help and she begins drinking excessively, After a run-in with her former fiancée, Helge, that may or may not have been rape, Jenny slits her wrist and dies.

While this book contains excellent (though bleak) writing, and many insights into the souls of the characters, it was obviously written when Undset was very young. It may simply be the mindset and attitude of the time, but I believe that the author knew nothing about sex, sexual relationships, pregnancy or childbirth. The scenes are too vague and ridiculous.

Undset did know Rome, and the best thing about this book was the lovely descriptions of the Eternal City as it was a century ago.