UNDSET, SIGRID. – Norwegian novelist, born in Kallundborg (Denmark) on 20 May 1882, died in Lillehammer (Norway) on 10 June 1949. Her father was a distinguished Norwegian archaeologist; when U. was still very young, she lost him and was forced to take employment in order to earn her living. She married the Norwegian painter A. S. Svarestad, from whom she divorced in 1925, keeping with her the four children they had had.
Her first novels reflect her experiences and difficulties and are stories of young women whose lives stand in bitter contrast to their ideals. Of these, the most noteworthy as a study of feminine psychology is Jenny (1911), written after a journey to Italy; it may be supplemented by the volume of short stories Fattige Skjaebner (1912). The interest U. felt in medieval Catholic Europe is already attested by her adaptation of the Arthurian legends: Kong Artur og riddere af det rund bord (1915), as well as by other writings inspired by the Middle Ages in Norway; her major work, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22),
is set in fourteenth-century Catholic Norway. Alongside this extensive trilogy, which is U.’s masterpiece, her other novel set in a medieval and national milieu should be remembered: Audunssön (1925–27). Having converted to Catholicism in 1926, U. wrote pamphlets and articles on religious exegesis, increasingly deepening her study of the philosophy and spiritual literature of Christianity. She visited Italy on several further occasions. Abandoning medieval subjects, she returned to subjects drawn from contemporary life, publishing other notable novels, among them Den brændende busk (1930), Den trofaste hustru (1936), and Madame Dorothea (1939), the latter among her finest works. In 1940, during the German occupation of Norway, she was forced to take refuge first in Sweden and then in the United States, returning to her homeland after the war. In 1928 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.