Beginning the narrative with her birth in Denmark, Nichols keeps an eye toward her whole life, drawing connections between her childhood and the stories she wrote. He both contextualizes Undset within her Norwegian culture and heritage and highlights the Catholic voices echoed in her fiction and essays. Nichols is a Dominican priest and academic who has published several books on Catholic writers, including Hans Urs Von Balthasar and G.K. By Nichols’ description, Undset was a “saga writer,” whose “insight-into, not least, the making and breaking of family and conjugal ties-would be one of her own greatest gifts.” She combines Jane Austen’s manners with Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual force. Undset was a novelist who had Dostoevsky’s depth of psychological insight and Tolstoy’s realism. Aidan Nichols, O.P., wrote one of the latter, Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, although it is less a biography and more an introduction to the author and her work. Nobel-Prize winning Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset seems to have garnered more attention in the past year than she did in the prior decade, thanks to new translations of her work by Tiina Nunnally, the reissuing of Undset’s lesser- known works by Cluny Media and a handful of books on Undset herself.
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