This is a guest post by Kristin Czarnecki.
I have known of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset all my life. My parents got my name from Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, a monumental achievement for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1928. The novels were still popular in the 1950s, when my parents met, and their mutual love of the trilogy’s eponymous heroine forged an early bond. I confess I didn’t read Kristin Lavransdatter until well into adulthood, but like my parents before me, I found myself captivated by the story of Kristin, a complex, headstrong, passionate woman struggling to live a life of faith and truth in 14th-century Norway. Kristin Lavransdatter has fallen in and out of fashion over the years and garnered renewed interest recently thanks to Tiina Nunnally’s fresh translation. The rest of Undset’s prodigious literary output remains less well known, however, including a previous medieval saga, a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, a memoir of World War II, and novels about women whose convictions and desires conflict with societal expectations. One such novel is Jenny, published in 1911, first translated into English in 1921.
Jenny’s opening pages display a hallmark of Undset’s style: vivid descriptions of the material world that establish the scene for the story that follows. “The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight,” the novel begins, as Helge, a Norwegian graduate student newly arrived in Rome, absorbs the dizzying array of sounds, smells, and sights that surround him:
It was The Merry Widow, played at a preposterously fast tempo, making it resound like a wild fanfare. And small, dark-haired soldiers stormed past him in the cold afternoon, as if they were no less than part of a Roman cohort which, at a furious double time, was about to fall upon the barbarian hosts rather than peacefully return home to the barracks for supper. Or perhaps that was exactly the reason they were in such a hurry, thought Helge with a smile; for as he stood there with his coat collar turned up against the cold, an oddly historical feeling came over him. But then he began humming along—‘No, a man will never understand women’—and continued down the street in the direction where he knew the Corso must be.
The line from The Merry Widow that Helge hums proves prophetic when he meets two other Norwegian expatriates in Rome, Francesca Jahrmann and Jenny Winge. Soon he becomes part of their coterie of artists amid the warmth, flora, food, and drink of an idyllic Roman spring. While Helge initially, and timidly, pursues Francesca (who has changed her given name, the old-fashioned Fransiska, to the Italian spelling), her hot-and-cold demeanor and interest in other men prompt him to turn his attentions toward Jenny, with whom he quickly falls in love. One sunny day, Jenny and Helge wander away from a picnic with the others and settle down in the grass, Helge’s head in Jenny’s lap. Against her better judgement, she gives in to his relentless begging for a kiss, and although she has qualms about their becoming involved, she gradually falls in love with him, and they plan a future together.
From this point on, the novel unfolds through Jenny’s perspective, and she proves to be one of the most intriguing fictional women I have ever encountered. The narrative describes her as tall, pale, thin, and graceful, with long blond curls and gray eyes. She wears white, gray, or black dresses and adorns herself with a simple necklace of pale pink beads—a cool exterior that belies her inner turmoil. We learn that she had a difficult childhood and harbors complex feelings toward her mother, “who had been widowed at the age of twenty and had nothing else in life but her young daughter.” Jenny has no memory of her father and lost a kind stepfather to an untimely death when she was a teenager. She was isolated and lonely at school, although she admits that her own arrogance stood in the way of making friends. “Superior and indifferent,” the narrative states, “she had smiled at the taunts and scorn of the whole class, feeling a silent and irreconcilable hatred that set in between her—who was not like the others—and all the rest of the children, who for her became a uniform mass, a many-headed monster.” As an adult, her yearning for a life of emotional and artistic integrity butts up against disheartening realities.
Back in Norway, Jenny and Helge must recalibrate their relationship amid complex family dynamics. Helge lives with his parents, and Jenny feels smothered in the toxic atmosphere of their profoundly dysfunctional marriage. “If only they could spend some time together again—just the two of them,” she muses, but they cannot, for, as she and Helge are engaged to be married, she is expected to spend an inordinate amount of time with her future in-laws. “She tried to think about their spring in the south, and she remembered the heat and the green campagna and the white flowers and the delicate silver mist on the mountains and her own joy. But she couldn’t seem to pull up an image of Helge from those days—the way he had looked to her adoring eyes.” Matters grow increasingly complicated when Helge’s father begins visiting Jenny in her studio and asks her to keep their meetings a secret from his wife. Frustrated and fed up, Jenny takes solace in her painting and in her friendship with a fellow artist, Gunnar Heggen, with whom she has long conversations about history, art, women, and men.
These conversations, along with a series of grim events, perhaps shed light on why Jenny is not more widely read. When Jenny asks Gunnar for an update on Francesca, for instance, problematic ideas emerge on all sides. A married woman now, Francesca only half-heartedly pursues her art and proves to be an inept, slovenly housewife, according to Gunnar. “If they have any children—and I’m certain they will,” he states, “you can be sure that Cesca will be done with painting. And it’s a damned shame. I have to admit, I think it’s sad.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny replies. “For a woman, having a husband and children . . . At any rate, sooner or later we start yearning for that.” Women are “by nature” meant to be wives and mothers, she claims, and she admits she would give up everything, including her painting, for the right man—because “that’s the way we were created—all of us!” she exclaims.
For his part, Gunnar expresses what even in 1911 must have been considered sexist notions. “I won’t even talk about female morals, because they don’t have any,” he tells Jenny, and he laments that women are only career-minded until they achieve their goal of marriage. If no suitable man turns up, however, “Then you start neglecting your work and go around looking worn out and unhappy and dissatisfied,” he says. Jenny nods. He later states, “Women don’t have souls—that’s a fact.” Most of the men in Jenny’s life infantilize her, calling her “little Jenny,” although she is 28 years old and fiercely independent when the novel begins. They treat her like a simple child nevertheless available for their sexual pleasure. Much to her mortification, she sometimes enjoys such oppression.
Unpalatable ideas, to be sure, but the novel addresses urgent questions of the time vis-à-vis changing gender roles, sexual double-standards for women and men, and the opportunities or lack thereof available to ambitious women. Jenny lets Gunnar do most of the talking during the aforementioned scene not because she has nothing to say but because she thinks before she speaks and chooses her words carefully. Throughout the novel, we find her solemnly contemplating matters relevant in any time, such as the role of art, the nature of love, wherein happiness lies, and how to know and be true to oneself. Undset imbues her characters, especially Jenny, with complex interiority and a longing for meaningful connection with others, which, sadly, often proves elusive.
My copy of The Unknown Sigrid Undset, in which Jenny appears, belonged to my mother. My father inscribed it and gave it to her for Christmas in 2001. Sigrid Undset remained a touchstone for my parents throughout their long marriage, and I think of them, both recently deceased, while on my own journey through her works. Kristin Lavransdatter is magnificent, but before it, there was Jenny, remarkable in its own right and worth getting to know.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.