36 Facts About Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset was a Danish-born Norwegian novelist.

Sigrid Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.

Sigrid Undset fled Norway for the United States in 1940 because of her opposition to Nazi Germany and the German invasion and occupation of Norway, but returned after World War II ended in 1945.

Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882 in the small town of Kalundborg, Denmark, at the childhood home of her mother, Charlotte Undset.

Sigrid Undset grew up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo.

When she was only 11 years old, her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Martin Sigrid Undset, died at the age of 40 after a long illness.

The family's economic situation meant that Sigrid Undset had to give up hope of a university education and after a one-year secretarial course she obtained work at the age of 16 as a secretary with an engineering company in Kristiania, a post she was to hold for 10 years.

Sigrid Undset joined the Norwegian Authors' Union in 1907 and from 1933 through 1935 headed its Literary Council, eventually serving as the union's chairwoman from 1936 until 1940.

Sigrid Undset was 16 years old when she made her first attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages.

Sigrid Undset had put aside the Middle Ages and had instead produced a realistic description of a woman with a middle-class background in contemporary Kristiania.

Sigrid Undset's books sold well from the start, and, after the publication of her third book, she left her office job and prepared to live on her income as a writer.

Sigrid Undset's parents had had a close relationship with Rome, and, during her stay there, she followed in their footsteps.

In Rome, Sigrid Undset met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married almost three years later.

Sigrid Undset was 30; Svarstad was thirteen years older, married, and had a wife and three children in Norway.

Sigrid Undset continued writing, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories.

Sigrid Undset entered the public debate on topical themes: women's emancipation and other ethical and moral issues.

Sigrid Undset had considerable polemical gifts, and was critical of emancipation as it was developing, and of the moral and ethical decline she felt was threatening in the wake of the First World War.

Sigrid Undset was at home in the subject matter, having written a short novel at an earlier stage about a period in Norwegian history closer to the Pre-Christian era.

Sigrid Undset had published a Norwegian retelling of the Arthurian legends.

Sigrid Undset had studied Old Norse manuscripts and Medieval chronicles and visited and examined Medieval churches and monasteries, both at home and abroad.

Sigrid Undset was now an authority on the period she was portraying and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages.

Sigrid Undset experimented with modernist tropes such as stream of consciousness in her novel, although the original English translation by Charles Archer excised many of these passages.

Sigrid Undset spent much of her life as an agnostic, but marriage and the outbreak of the First World War were to change her attitudes.

Sigrid Undset was received into the Catholic Church in November 1924, after thorough instruction from the Catholic priest in her local parish.

Sigrid Undset selected her themes from the small Catholic community in Norway.

Sigrid Undset published a number of weighty historical works which put the history of Norway into a sober perspective.

When Joseph Stalin's invasion of Finland touched off the Winter War, Sigrid Undset supported the Finnish war effort by donating her Nobel Prize on 25 January 1940.

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Sigrid Undset was forced to flee.

Sigrid Undset had strongly criticised both Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler since the early 1930s, and, from an early date, her books were banned in Nazi Germany.

Sigrid Undset accordingly knew her name was on a list of those to be rounded up in the first wave of arrests and had no wish to become a target of the Gestapo.

Sigrid Undset's library had already been secretly divided between her closest local friends.

Sigrid Undset was active in St Ansgar's Scandinavian Catholic League and wrote several articles for its bulletin.

Sigrid Undset traveled to Florida, where she became a close friend of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Sigrid Undset lived another four years but never published another word.

Sigrid Undset died at 67 in Lillehammer, Norway, where she had lived from 1919 through 1940.

Sigrid Undset was buried in the village of Mesnali, 15 kilometers east of Lillehammer, where her daughter and the son who died in battle are remembered.