Jenny (Paperback)

by Sigrid Undset (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator) "The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight..." (more)
Key Phrases: Froken Winge, Froken Jahrmann, Fru Gram (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
First published in 1911 when the author was 29, this unsparing novel tells the story of Jenny Winge, a talented Norwegian painter whose search for artistic inspiration in Rome lands her in the arms of a married man. Her decision to have their baby out of wedlock and raise it by herself brought charges of immorality against the author, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1928, and the book. This is a new translation and the first English edition of Jenny since 1921, with censored passages restored. "Everyone and everything leaps off the page." — The New York Times Book Review

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: 8.3 x 5 x 0.9 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.com Sales Rank: #359,617 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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 (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 16 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

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.