The “half-lovely” realistic setting of her fiction would be “the town,” no more and no less a scrupulously realized community of all-too-human beings than an exquisitely delineated collection of buildings and pos-sessions, perceived through that female consciousness sometimes dismissed as “intuition.” The old Vikings, like their Germanic Iron Age ancestors, knew better, ascribing intuition to woman’s capacity to marshal myriad tiny details into near-supernatural insights. In her mid-twenties, Undset thus announced the techniques and themes that would reverberate throughout her life’s work. We carry on and find a job which allows us to live–we can’t live for it. I could write a book about you or myself or about any of us office-worms. I could love and make use of all the worn-out little words which we all let fall so carelessly-words we use when we drop in on someone, words that go with some sign of love, words whispered in grief or in the surprise of some small joy. The wet dirty streets and the worn paving-stones, small apartments and small shops,-I should really like to write about the windows of such shops,-you know, shops selling chemists’ sundries, and toy-shops with dolls and sewing-boxes and glass necklaces, where children stand outside in clusters and say “Bags I that one.” Oh, when I now know how many tiny pathetic longings outside such shops have sprinkled their dew over every pennyworth of happiness bought in them.
all these half-lovely districts we respectable drudges live in. For ten years she worked in an Oslo office and immersed herself in books until late at night she was driven by the un-quenchable desire she voiced in 1908 through one of her earliest heroines, Charlotte Hedels, narrator of the short story Undset ironically titled “The Happy Age”: Like many poor Norwegian girls of her generation, Undset in 1898 took up the responsibilities of maturity at 16 years of age.
Sigrid Undset’s youth, which was the matrix of her artistic message, was far from the carefree “happy age” that many people today consider the privilege, if not the right, of adolescents.
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