Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset had published her most significant novel in three volumes earlier that decade. Kristin Lavrandsdotter is an epic historical fiction, set in Norway in the Middle Ages, which follows the eponymous heroine from her youth to her old age. Undset was the daughter of a well-known archaeologist and her interest in the past began when she was a small girl. She later cited her childhood reading of the Old Norse sagas as 'the most important turning point in my life' and her finest novel has some of the elemental quality of the medieval stories she so admired. It is also a book that finds the concerns and anxieties of the 20th century - political, spiritual and sexual - reflected in the distant mirror of the 14th century. This is not historical fiction as escapist literature. In the first of the three volumes, The Wreath, readers see Kristin as a young woman and watch her break her betrothal to another man in order to pursue her passionate relationship with the attractive but irresponsible Erlend Nikolausson. In the second volume, The Wife, she is married to Erlend and obliged to shoulder the responsibilities of motherhood and the management of his estate, as he strives to make his way in the brutal politics of the era. The trilogy concludes with The Cross in which Kristin, estranged from Erlend, faces the destruction of her world with the coming of the Black Death. Kristin Lavrandsdotter is one of the greatest of all works of historical fiction, a novel conceived on a gigantic scale which succeeds both as a remarkable evocation of the past in which it is set and as a record of one vividly created character's progress through life.

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