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The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works

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I have recently bought "The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works" published by Steerforth Press. This volume is the most carefully edited omnibus I have ever seen. It's clear that book lovers have done their work here, people who put love for books above everything else, including strictly commercial motivations. "Jenny" was out of print for what - 70 years? Perhaps more. The old translation from the 1920s apparently utilized the archaic English language, and thus Undset herself had decided to take it out of the circulation. You can also find an online interview with the translator, Tiina Nunnally, who translated it anew, and learn how difficult it is to bring old Scandinavian novels back to life, so that they are accessible to the XXI century reader, and yet do not lose anything of its original charm and style. It is a noble deed, really, in this day and age - to reprint the pearls of literature and in such careful way at that.

"Jenny" is a story of a young Norwegian lady, a painter and a spinster, who remained in that state despite the fact that she was both physically attractive, and very well liked, a young persona whose companionship was sought by her peers. A small group of artistically gifted young Scandinavian people spends their summers in Rome before World War I, to remain there for a long time, only occasionally coming back to the native soil. Her observations, the observations of a young traveling woman, are full of wisdom, full of realism so much unlike the sentimental, eerie otherworldliness and nonchalance of the contemporary characters, for you have to remember that "Jenny" was written in 1911, when the effects of the decadent new wave in literature and culture were still strong.

At moments I am reminded of the atmosphere in Maugham's "Of Human Bondage", the parts where Philip enters the bohemian world of the painters during his venture as an art student, but it's only a distant recollection, because Undset's novel is infinitely gentler, and the fact is, more fresh than Maugham's - and I find it much more to my personal liking than Maugham anyway. Undset is mercifully brief in her descriptions, which are devoid of ornaments, and I find that I get the picture in a much clearer way, I feel as if I were there, with them, assisting the characters from the position of a crow, sitting on a cold marble stone lion, observing everything in my omni cognitive way of a crow. Maybe it's just because I grew up in Europe, in those mossy old places, where earth gives life to small plants in-between the cracks of old carved stones and buildings, where the early old city morning is incomparable with anything you've seen or felt.

"Jenny" is a grand love story, a tragic story of a young woman who did not seek carnal pleasures, the easy-come-easy-go type of relationship that people her age seemed to enjoy. Attractive and intelligent, she was lonely, very lonely, and when she finally subsided to the impulse, the whole life has changed. With her lover, she entered the morbid world of suppressed unhealthy emotions, which he carried from home like a burden of a graveyard stone on a chest, immovable and paralyzing. The insecure man drowned Jenny in his toxic love, for love is always toxic if the object is not the other person, but he who loves, or rather claims to love. Once the young Norwegians briefly return home, we realize why he behaved as he did, and so the tragic story begins, and for the next two hundred pages a reader will be spellbound by the powerful voice of Sigrid Undset.

"And the worst thing would be to share life with another person but deep inside feel just as lonely as before. Oh, no, no. To belong to a man, with all the subsequent types of intimacy, both physical and spiritual... and then one day to see that she had never known him, and he had never known her, and neither of them had ever understood a word the other person said...(...) So she had to try painting again. Presumably it would be an utter disaster, since she was walking around sick with love. She laughed. That's what was wrong with her. The object of her affection hadn't yet appeared, but the love was there."

This novel is a masterpiece of literature, and it's hard to believe that Undset was very young when she conceived this novel. Only from her letters to her longtime German pen-pal, we learn that she started writing as a very young girl, and that she devoted all her young life to writing, slaving away in an obscure office to be able to support her writing of "Kristin Lavransdatter", a historical trilogy for which much later, in 1928, Undset was awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. Don't be put off just because Undset is Norwegian, and now forgotten. Her writing is wonderful, and I wish people discovered this writer anew, because she deserves recognition, but even more she deserves modern readership. Try it - you won't be disappointed.

Besides "Jenny", the book contains also a novella, "Thjodolf", and a short story, "Simonsen". Both are rather depressing, to tell the truth. The latter is a story of unmet expectations and brutality of life in the turn-of-the-century urban Norway, while the former is a heartbreaking story of a woman and the adopted child. Written when Undset was just sixteen, "Thjodolf" is one of the best novellas I have ever read, and definitely powerful enough to shatter you to pieces. Sigrid Undset was a writer of unmatched class, and it's a pity that her works are not popular nowadays. Let us only hope that the current edition will alter that state.

This volume showcases some great early works by Sigrid Undset that give a foretaste of the Nobel Prize-winning books she would write 10-20 years later. The novel "Jenny," from 1911, tells the fate of a young woman painter during her years in Rome and later back home in Oslo. Undset's descriptions are as vivid as a painting themselves, and the characters of Jenny and her artist friends in Rome will remind you of people you know today. And isn't that one thing that makes great art universal? Undset's letters to her Swedish penpal reveal the desire of a young writer to escape her humdrum office-worker existence -- Undset worked for a German electrical company for 10 years! -- and have the time to do nothing but write; these letters are astoundingly mature for a 21-year-old. If you want to see where the celebrated author of "Kristin Lavransdatter" started out (and read it in the limpid prose of Tiina Nunnally's exquisitely rendered translation), this is the book for you!

After reading the Tiina Nunnally translations of Undset's Gunnar's Daughter, and Kristin Lavransdatter (all 3 vol.), I was more than hooked on Undset, I was obsessed. I ordered Jenny from the library and loved the immediacy and complete contemporariness of the book. I know contemporariness is not a word but heck, I can't think of the correct term. Sigrid Undset is a solid writer-- her characters are complex, intelligent, dynamic and they face interesting ethical and moral quetions. I give Gunnar's Daughter and Krisin Lavransdatter (which is an amazing trilogy) 5 stars. Jenny did not have the hefty power of these two (read the introductions!) but it is a very enjoyable story.

Summary: Some early realist works by a Nobel Prize-winning author that read as if they were written today.

Pity the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who haven't the good fortune to write in English. If they aren't known in the English-speaking world before they win the international award, their works are quickly translated into English, and then just as quickly forgotten by all except the academics.

And for every exception to the rule, for every Thomas Mann or Alexander Solzhenitzyn, there is a Karl Adolph Gjellerup, a Grazia Deledda, or a Frans Eemil Sillanpaa, all of them once honored with the prestigious prize, all of them likely still read in their native tongues, but none of them still on the English-speaking bestseller lists - or even the remainder piles.

Sigrid Undset's literary fate falls somewhere between that of the Manns on one side and the Gjellerups on the other. The Norwegian author, who wrote during the first half of the 20th century, is today best known for her multi-volume medieval novels, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken.

But before she wrote those masterpieces - the research for which partially influenced her conversion to the Catholic faith - and before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, Undset was known for her realistic novels of modern life. These novels have been favorably compared with those of her contemporary, Theodore Dreiser.

The Unknown Sigrid Undset introduces a new generation of readers to some of these early works.

The bulk of this volume consists of Undset's 1912 novel Jenny, which has been out of print in English since the 1930s. This new translation by Tiina Nunnally - who also translated the recent thriller Smilla's Sense of Snow - restores passages that had been cut in the earlier English version for either unbridled lyricism or supposed salaciousness.

Jenny tells the story of a young Norwegian artist living in bohemian Rome in the early decades of the 20th century. The story seems to be semi-autobiographical. Undset knew the struggles of a working class, female artist: She worked as a secretary to support her widowed mother and younger sister for 10 years before she could afford to move to Italy as a full-time writer.

Jenny, the protagonist of the novel, can't reconcile her artistic need to create with her maternal need to nurture. Undset sees this split as the eternal dilemma of the female artist in a male-dominated world. And although a feminist, Undset ultimately comes down on the side of motherhood. For Undset, biology was destiny, and that assertion was politically incorrect even in 1912.

The book and its author were blasted by ideologues on both ends of the spectrum. Reviewers denounced Jenny for its sexual frankness and overall "sordidness." Feminists decried it as heresy, a betrayal by one of their own. The controversy was not unlike that being played out in literary and feminist circles today.

The other fictional works in The Unknown Sigrid Undset are equally contemporary in their themes.

The short story "Thjodolf" - as fresh and disturbing as today's headlines - is the story of a woman who loves a foster child. The child's birth mother comes back into the picture demanding her maternal rights, and the inevitable tragedy results.

"Simonsen" is a quieter tale of poverty and desperation. The title character is a loser in the eyes of the world - he can't afford to both live with and support the family of his old age. At Christmas time, his adult children agree to help him and his new family, but only if he agrees to leave the mistress and the five-year-old daughter he loves.

In addition to the fiction, this volume includes a collection of the author's letters that have never before been translated into English. The letters - written by Undset to Andrea (Dea) Hedburg Forsberg, her pen pal of more than forty years - cover the period from 1900 to 1913, when Undset was developing as a writer. As such they present a portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Considering the themes and obsessions of Undset's fiction, it is significant that the letters - and the book - end with her announcement of the birth of her first child. The roles of creative artist and nurturing mother were finally reconciled in Undset's life.

The Unknown Sigrid Undset offers today's readers the works of a young writer who portrays the world as it really is, yet is searching for the ultimate truths behind that reality.

"Jenny" is pre-Christian Undset but it is clear that her conversion was already beginning as she examines issues like integrity, love and suffering in a fated, godless universe. The author creates a deep, introspective feminine character that one suspects is quite a bit like her own. Jenny tries to live her life being true to herself, telling no lies. When she finds that she has sacrificed integrity to chase a counterfeit love, she cannot forgive herself. She suffers the loss of her child but cannot make sense of her grief. She passes a death sentence upon herself. Not long after Undset wrote the story, she found Catholicism and it's world where sin and suffering lead not to death but to the Redeemer.

Thjodolf is another tale in this collection where a woman's perfectionism in love leads to the self-destruction of her spirit. Yet this one ends with a ray of hope.