Are Brothers Taking Back Our Sister?

Just back from an early-morning meeting, I grabbed the new edition of Kristin Lavransdatter off my shelf to re-read the critical introduction to Tiina Nunnally’s award-winning translation. The intro is supplied by Brad Leithauser, a poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher of writing. While it suffers from the same secular academic slant I complained of in my previous post, Leithauser’s short piece does acknowledge a religious element in Kristin and makes other worthwhile points.

As does Stephen Sparrow, a New Zealander who has helped refocus attention on Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian author of Kristin who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Is it a coincidence that, in my short survey of academic appraisals, the two males surveyed are most alert to the religious content of Undset’s writing, while the two females (see previous post) highlight her eroticism and feminism?

Leithauser, who teaches at Johns Hopkins, notes that one of the themes of Kristin Lavransdatter is “the stubborn power of magic.” Further on, he calls the trilogy “the tale of a scandalous woman” and writes admiringly of “Undset’s bold and nuanced treatment of sexuality.” Note to reader: “Bold” here is a come-on, pure and simple. The most graphic sexual reference in the seven volumes of Kristin and Master combined occurs in a fight, when Erland, Kristin’s husband, is stabbed with a spear through the groin. Lady Chatterley’s Lover this is not. However, magic and sex make better leads, perhaps especially for today’s academic elite, than religion does. They also sell the book Leithauser is introducing.

Leithauser does provide one datum that will cheer the most frustrated Undsetophile (one who, like me, believes that she must be the most neglected great Catholic author ever.) He quotes the Book-of-the-Month Club, which made the original Arthur Chater translation a monthly selection. Wrote BOMC’s editors:

“We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.”

Noting Undset’s conversion to Catholicism, Leithauser calls it “a seemingly inevitable move for someone whose imagination was rooted in the pre-Reformation Europe.” This seems a bit shallow—like saying that it was inevitable for Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, to become a gladiator.

Near the end of his introduction, Leithauser compares Kristin with other great epics of chick lit like Vanity Fair and Gone with the Wind, but with a distinction. Here the critic acknowledges Kristin’s “encompassing religiosity” with Kristin Lavransdatter finally undergoing “a gradual but inevitable repudiation of the flesh.” This transformation in Undset’s great heroine—her omega point in the three-volume saga—is completely left out of account by the female critics lambasted in my previous post. 

In “Sigrid Undset: Catholic Viking,” Stephen Sparrow notes that Undset considered The Master of Hestviken “superior to Kristin” while “the German Jewish Carmelite nun and philosopher Edith Stein (canonized in 1998) never tired of recommending it to any young female student whom she thought lacked a firm grip on reality.” Imagine that! A woman author who considered her “man classic” greater than her “woman classic”! Not to mention a Jewish woman convert who advised her female followers to follow The Master.

In the original Norwegian, Master was published as Olav Audunsson, the name of the central character. Undset’s preference for Olav over Kristin may have had something to do with the (male) publisher who told her to abandon Olav’s medieval story when she was a young author, with the haughty pronouncement: “They're not your line. Why not try something with a more modern theme?” Sparrow calls this editorial advice “one of the great wrong calls in literary history.” It must have been with triumphant satisfaction that Undset picked up Olav’s story again after making a hit with Kristin.

Sparrow links “Catholic Viking” to a remarkable 1927 essay by Undset entitled “Catholic Propaganda.” Undset’s essay is so substantial that it is worth a new post, to follow this one. Here is the opener, which may put a smile on your Catholic lips:

“If a thoroughgoing Protestant is asked, ‘Are you saved?,’ and he has experienced a ‘conversion,’ he will without hesitation answer affirmatively. But no Catholic would dare to say more than that he hopes for salvation.”