She focuses on the life Kristin carves out irrespective of them, a life involving a broken engagement, a scandalous love affair, and a slowly splintering relationship with her seven sons. Throughout her lifespan, major world events provide a backdrop of endless political intrigue, rises and falls from fortune and glory, and the arrival of the Black Death in Norway in 1349.īut Undset doesn’t focus on those major world events. She leads a mostly normal life, but like all of us, she lives in abnormal times. It follows the life of one medieval Norwegian woman named (you guessed it) Kristin Lavransdatter, from the age of 7 until she dies somewhere around the age of 50. You can purchase it as either one volume or as three separate ones.

Kristin Lavransdatter is over 1,000 pages long and was published in three parts between 1920 (one century old, baby!) and 1922. She wrote other highly acclaimed novels, but none have had the staying power (at least in the US and UK) of Kristin. Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, who in 1928 became the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of those writers whose career has been largely defined by one book: her massive tome Kristin Lavransdatter. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend. By that time, she was fully exhausted and stopped writing all together.One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. To evade persecution she fled to the USA and came back only after Norway was liberated. Ultimately, it was the Second World War, which sapped all her energies.

Indeed, it was a tough time for her as two of these children were handicapped yet she carried on with her work. She had spent the intervening years looking after own children as well as her three stepchildren. However, it was not until her separation from her painter husband that she could concentrate on writing her famous trilogy. Therefore, she left her job to pursue her passion for writing. Undeterred she began to write about the life in contemporary Norway, which became very popular. Her first historical novel, set up in medieval Denmark, could not find any publisher. Instead, she took secretarial job and continued with her studies. Born as the eldest child of an internationally known archeologist, she had always been interested in history and literature but her father’s premature death deprived her of university education. Sigrid Undset was Norwegian novelist and a Nobel Prize winner, who first came to international limelight for her historical trilogy titled ‘Kristin Lavransdatter’.

Kristin undset