Taking Back Our Sister

Papists to the barricades! Occupy Oslo! The greatest Catholic novelist of the 20th century, Sigrid Undset, has been captured by the forces of darkness.

The only English-language biographer* of the author of Kristin Lavransdatter compares the book with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It hails the author’s most famous work as “highly erotic,” chirping about its “passionate love scenes” and Undset’s feminism while scarcely acknowledging the most remarkable fact of Undset’s adult life, her Catholic faith.

Imagine Dorothy Day being highlighted as an anti-Vietnam rabblerouser in a book that also features Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. Imagine Flannery O’Connor being remembered as a raiser of peahens.

Still don’t get it? Imagine the City of New York taking over St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a homeless shelter. Which still might happen.

So stand up for your culture, Catholics! Free our sister now! Free Sigrid Undset! Liberal academics have coöpted a Catholic treasure, the few who are paying attention.

In The Art of Compassion: A Biography of Sigrid Undset, the single chapter dealing with the author’s scandalous 1924 conversion to Catholicism in a Lutheran country with less than 3,000 Catholics (Norway) is the shortest chapter in the book, and the chapter is titled The Master of Hestviken. That is, the book wedges Undset’s faith and her real masterpiece (in my opinion) into eight pages and dedicates the remaining 260+ to her feminism, with a slight nod of the head to her anti-Nazi activism.

Likewise, Sherrill Harbison, a “Scandinavianist” writing an introduction to Undset’s early pre-Catholic work Gunnar’s Daughter, speaks blithely of Undset’s importance in the “post-Christian era.”

Sigrid Undset has been taken from us—and—but look! She has been imprisoned inside the 500-krone note! Do you think that’s because of her faith? In Norway?! Free Sigi! Free Sigi now!

Here’s why we Catholics should pay more attention to Sigrid Undset.

1. She was the only overtly Catholic female author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Name another.)

2. When Undset converted to Catholicism in 1924, it was a scandal. She was condemned from Lutheran pulpits far and wide. She is that rare phenomenon, a literary martyr for the faith. (Believe me, writers are more protective of their reputations than saints of their lives.)

3. Like Dorothy Day, an American convert of the same era, Undset had to turn away the man she loved and the father of her children in order to become a Catholic. Neither Day nor Undset did so out of selfishness. Undset was married to a divorced man, who brought three children to the marriage. They had three children of their own, but he proved unfaithful to her and insisted on separate living arrangements. Since the Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, when she decided to convert she chose to have her marriage annulled. However, she told the father of her children, whom she still loved, that he was welcome in their home at any time. He did not make himself welcome.

4. She was a female Catholic spokesman for women’s rights, which might seem an oxymoron to some. It makes a world of sense to me, as the Catholic father of two grown daughters.

5. Finally, and most importantly, her books are not “erotic masterpieces,” as her biographer, Yola Sigerson Miller, would have us believe. They are subtle, poetic testaments to faith and the power of Christ in the Catholic Church to redeem us. The Master of Hestviken alone is the best argument ever advanced for sacramental confession.

But if we Catholics don’t pay attention, Undset will soon be viewed as the Norwegian Gloria Steinem. Next up, St. Patrick’s Homeless Shelter.

* The author of The Art of Compassion: A Biography of Sigrid Undset is Yola Miller Sigerson, whose primary qualification, according to her bio, is that she was “the lighting designer for the Original Ballet Russes when Sol Hurok brought it to America.” Do you think it’s time for a real Catholic biographer to step forward?