The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works by Sigrid Undset. Ed. with intro. by Tim Page. Trans. Tiina Nunnally and Naomi Walford
James Crossley

Sigrid Undset. The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works. Ed. with intro. Tim Page. Trans. Tiina Nunnally and Naomi Walford. Steerforth, 2001. 406 pp. $30.00.

As Tim Page points out in his introduction, every used bookstore in America has copies of Undset’s massive medieval opus, Kristin Lavransdatter, sitting untouched on dusty shelves. Though her Nobel prize came to her in 1928, there’s a certain mustiness about her reputation, as though she’d lived in the era she most famously recorded. This publication blows away most of the cobwebs and proves her vitality is undiminished today. Jenny, originally published in 1911, fills almost three-quarters of the book, describing the travels and troubles of a Norwegian painter in her late twenties. Her concerns-career, love, family-wouldn’t be unfamiliar even to Bridget Jones, but infusing all of them is a moral seriousness, a desire to live a just and truthful life. Although Undset isn’t as frank as she could have been in our post-Joycean age, she undoubtedly benefitted from working outside of America’s puritanical tradition, and there’s a refreshing lack of coyness in the way she deals with Jenny’s sexuality. It’s not the heroine’s erotic life but her intellect that’s most notable, however. She perceives and can expound upon every nuance of every situation in which she finds herself, although her life isn’t thereby made any less somber. The remainder of the volume consists of two short stories and a selection of Undset’s own letters that serve mostly to complement Jenny. That novel by itself is a worthy addition to the all-too-small chorus of early-twentieth-century women’s voices. [James Crossley]