Halldór Laxness

This week I don’t have cool pictures I took myself regarding this week’s subject, the author Halldór Laxness.  We tried really, really hard though, and it’s kind of a funny story.  My mom looked up where Laxness is buried on Find A Grave, a pretty good site for that sort of thing.  Find A Grave says he’s in Fossvogskirkjugarður, in Reykjavik.  Getting there was in and of itself an adventure and a pain, but we finally made it.  We had the picture from Find A Grave to go on and we were all set.  It fairly quickly became apparent that this was not where Laxness is buried.  Fossvogskirkjugarður is very woodsy and, while over a sort of bay, there’s no way that you can see mountains and a river and all that, like in the picture from the website.  Fossvogskirkjugarður is very pretty and has some really neat stuff, but it’s not what we were looking for, so we called it a night.

After googling and finding the Wikimedia Commons link, we find out that he’s actually buried in the cemetery at Mossfellskirkja in Mossfellsdalur – near Reykjavik, but not workable in the time we had left in the area.  So, no actual pictures from me of anything Laxness-related.  This one is from Find A Grave (so you can see what we were looking for!).  I was told, though, that a building we walked by down the main street in Reykjavik is where he was born, but my cousin wasn’t quite sure of the exact building, so no photo of that either.  On to the actual, brief history of Halldór Laxness.

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born Halldór Guðjónsson on April 23, 1902 in Reykjavik, Iceland.  His family lived in Reykjavik until 1905, when they moved out of town to Mosfellsbær.  I didn’t find a whole lot on young Halldór, but it is known that he was writing from a young age.  In the winter of 1915-1916, Laxness went to the technical school in Reykjavik, and in 1916 he published his first piece, an article, in the newspaper Morgunblaðið.  A few years later, in 1919, Laxness published his first novel, Barn náttúrunnar: ástarsaga (Child of Nature: A Romance).  Around this same time, Laxness began travelling through Europe.

This was a crucial point in Laxness’s life in that this is when he went from Halldór Guðjónsson to Halldór Kiljan Laxness.  In 1922, Laxness joined the Abbaye Saint-Maurice-et-Saint-Maur in Luxembourg, and in 1923 he was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church as Halldór Kiljan Laxness.  Laxness was taken from the farm he grew up on, and Kiljan was for the Irish martyr, Saint Killian.  At the Abbaye Laxness practiced self-study, studying French, Latin, theology, and philosophy.  He also joined a group that was praying for the Nordic countries to convert back to Catholicism.

This religious period didn’t last long though; from 1927 to 1929, Laxness was living in America and “he became attracted to socialism” (1).  Influenced by this and Upton Sinclair, whom he also befriended, Laxness wrote 1929’s Alþýðubókin (The Book of the People).  At this same time Laxness decided to give his go at writing screenplays and moved to Hollywood for a time; he was a big fan of Chaplin’s film City Lights.  In 1929, Laxness faced deportation, probably in part due to his socialism, and “Sinclair and Stephen Crane’s daughter, Helen, intervened” (2).  In the 1940s, Laxness would translate some of Sinclair’s and Ernest Hemingway’s works into Icelandic.

Despite, or maybe because of, this, Laxness moved back to Iceland in 1930 where he “‘became the apostle of the younger generation’” (3).  Laxness was quite prolific in this period, writing the first two parts of Salka Volka, and Fótatak manna (Steps of Man), as well as short story collections and essays.  In 1934, Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) was published.  If you’ve heard of Laxness and his work, it’s probably this book, partly because in 1946 Independent People was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection and sold over 450,000 in the United States.  Because of his socialism and some regard for the Soviet Union, Laxness was investigated by J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover wanted to keep the royalties Laxness earned out of “red Icelandic hands” (4).

In 1948, Laxness had a house built outside of Mosfellsbær and began a family with his second wife, who also worked as his secretary and manager.  At this time the US was developing a permanent military base in Keflavik (about an hour from Reykjavik).  They had had a base there during the Second World War and wanted to extend it.  Laxness wrote a satirical piece, Atómstöðin (The Atom Station), about this, and it’s probable that this added to the US’s dislike of him.

In the 1950s, accolades began to flow in for Laxness.  In 1953, he was awarded the World Peace Council Literary Prize, a Soviet-sponsored prize.  In 1955, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “‘for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland’” (5).  He is Iceland’s first and only Nobel laureate.

In the 1960s Laxness was active writing and producing plays in Iceland.  In 1969 he won the Sonning Prize, a prize “awarded biennially for outstanding contributions to European culture” (6).  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he continued to write essays.  As he grew older, though, he developed Alzheimer’s and moved into a nursing home, where he died at age 95.

Laxness’s home and garden, Gljúfrasteinn, is now a museum run by the Icelandic government.  One of his daughters is an Oscar-nominated director.  A biography of him “won the Icelandic literary prize for best work of non-fiction in 2004” (7).  Laxness’s legacy lives on in Iceland.

1, 3, 5 - Halldór Laxness

2, 4 - Richard Rayner, “The magical and the elemental, fromHalldór Laxness,” Los Angeles Times, January6, 2008.

6 - Sonning Prize

Zitkala-Ša

            Sorry for the delay in this.  I was sick, again, last weekend and spent most of the weekend asleep.  By Monday I was a bit better, but since I’d lost a few days, I didn’t have this ready then.   I like winter, but I’m over it this year.  I haven’t been sick this much in a while.

            I found today’s topic somewhere on Pinterest.  I have a board for historical women, and Zitkala-Ša is on it.  The pin came from a “this day in history” thing and it’s for her birthday (February 22).  The caption just says “On this date in 1876, Zitkala Sa was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She would go on to write several books, including American Indian Stories, co-write the first Native American opera, and found the National Council of American Indians” (1).  Not a whole lot of information, but just enough to get me interested and wanting to know more.

            Zitkala-Ša was born Gertrude Simmons on February 22, 1876 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Yankton Sioux Agency, or Yankton Indian Reservation - depending on the source - in South Dakota.  She was the third child of Ellen Simmons, also called Taté Iyòhiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind), a Yankton Nakota Sioux.  Zitkala-Ša’s father was a European-American by the name of Felker, but he abandoned the family when Zitkala-Ša was young.

            Zitkala-Ša lived on the reservation until she was eight in “freedom and happiness” (2).  In 1884, missionaries arrived at the reservation and Zitkala-Ša was taken to White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana.  White’s was a Quaker school set up to educate the poor and unfortunate so they could do better in life. 

            While Zitkala-Ša was only at White’s for three years, it was hugely important in her life.  In The School Days of an Indian Girl, published in 1921, Zitkala-Ša wrote of the “deep misery of having her heritage stripped away, when she was forced to pray as a Quaker and cut her traditionally long hair, and the contrasting joy of learning to read and write, and to play the violin” (3).

            In 1887, when Zitkala-Ša returned to the reservation, she didn’t feel like she belonged anymore, and so, in 1891, she returned to White’s, wanting more education.  White’s taught girls enough to become house-keepers, but Zitkala-Ša wanted more than that.  She learned piano and violin, and became the music teacher when the previous teacher resigned.  It was around this time that Gertrude Simmons adopted the name Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird) as a way of “asserting both her independence from and her ties to Sioux culture” (4).  Zitkala-Ša is a Lakota name, though she grew up speaking Nakota.  One source posits that choosing a Lakota name “might indicate a profound dislocation from her family origins, as well as a conscious choice” (5).

            In 1895, Zitkala-Ša received her diploma and her mother wanted her to come back home, but Zitkala-Ša went on to Earlham College in Indiana on a scholarship.  At Earlham, though, Zitkala-Ša felt isolated from her white fellow students.  The students only paid attention to her after she gave a speech, “Side by Side”, and won the Indiana State Oratorical Contest in 1896.  Zitkala-Ša did well at Earlham, but unfortunately had to leave just over a month before graduation due to illness.

            Around this same time Zitkala-Ša began compiling Native American legends.  She would translate them into Latin and then English, in the hopes of getting children to read them.  Compiling legends would become one of the focuses of Zitkala-Ša’s life.

            For her violin playing, Zitkala-Ša received a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she attended from 1897 to 1899.  In 1899, she took a position at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.  Zitkala-Ša taught music to the children, and “conducted debates on the treatment of Native Americans” (6).

            While employed by Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša played at the 1900 Paris Exposition with the school’s Indian Band.  At this time she also began writing about Native American life, getting published in Harper’s Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, and others.  These articles upset the higher-ups at Carlisle and so she was sent out West, ostensibly to recruit students, but more likely to remove her from the publishing centers in the United States.

            When Zitkala-Ša arrived back out West, she found her mother’s home in an awful state and her brother’s family living in poverty.  Additionally, there were white settlers on the lands that the Yankton Dakota had been given in 1877 through the Dawes Act (7).

            Zitkala-Ša returned to Carlisle after a while, but upon her return her conflicts with the founder of the school intensified.  She didn’t like that the school focused on assimilating Native students into white culture, and only trained its students for low-level jobs; the school assumed its students would return to where they had come from and that they wouldn’t need more than a basic education.  Carlisle also didn’t like her stories, calling them “worse than pagan” and “trash” (8).

            Due to her continued conflicts with Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša was dismissed from her position in 1901.  She had had an article published in Harper’s Monthly that year that told of a boy at the school who felt a loss of identity after his education.  After being dismissed, Zitkala-Ša returned home to Yankton, worried for her family.  Also at this time, the Native American stories and legends she had been compiling were collected and published in Old Indian Legends, commissioned by a Boston company.  Old Indian Legends was published to high acclaim; in 1919 she received a letter of praise for the book from Helen Keller.

            Upon returning to Yankton, Zitkala-Ša took a position as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Standing Rock Indian Reservation.  In 1902, Zitkala-Ša met Captain Raymond Talefase Bonnin; they married later that year.  Bonnin was raised Yankton Dakota as well, but was only one quarter to one half Dakota.  Shortly after marrying, Bonnin was transferred to Utah; they moved to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation where they lived for fourteen years, and where their only child, Raymond Ohiya Bonnin, was born.

            While in Utah, Zitkala-Ša met William F. Hanson, a professor at Brigham Young University.  Hanson was also a composer, and the two began a musical collaboration in 1910.  Based on a sacred Sioux ritual that the U.S. government had prohibited from being done on the Utah reservations, The Sun Dance Opera premiered in Vernal, Utah in 1913.  Zitkala-Ša wrote the libretto and the songs for the opera, the first opera co-written by a Native American.  In performances, Ute performers danced and played some parts, but all of the lead singing was done by white people.  The opera received much praise upon its premiere.  It was performed periodically by rural troupes over the years before premiering in New York in 1938.  The advertisements in New York only mentioned Hanson.

            While in Utah, Zitkala-Ša joined the Society of American Indians, which was formed in 1911.  She served as its secretary until 1916, and edited its journal, American Indian Magazine, from 1918 to 1919.  SAI members had to have Indian blood.  They were assimilationist, but also promoted Native American self-determination.  A main goal was to get full American citizenship for Native Americans.  (Towards the end of the twentieth century, SAI was criticized “as misguided in their strong advocacy of citizenship and employment rights for Native Americans.  Such critics believe that Native Americans have lost cultural identity as they have become more part of mainstream American society.” [9])

            Zitkala-Ša criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs for prohibiting Native American children’s use of their native languages and cultural practices.  In the 1920s, Zitkala-Ša helped promote a pan-Indian movement to help get citizenship rights.  In 1924 the Indian Citizenship Act was passed, but it did not secure citizenship for all Native Americans.

            In 1926, Zitkala-Ša and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians.  This group, too, worked to unite all Native Americans in a hopes to get full citizenship rights through suffrage.  Zitkala-Ša served as NCAI’s president, speaker, and major fundraiser from its founding until her death.  When the group was revived in 1944, Zitkala-Ša’s work was dismissed.

            Zitkala-Ša died on January 26, 1938 in Washington, D.C.  She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery due to her husband’s service in World War One.  She is buried as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin.  There is a crater on Venus named Bonnin in her honor (all craters on Venus are named for women or have women’s names).

            It’s agreed that Zitkala-Ša had two major periods of work.  The first is from 1900 to 1904.  This period includes the Native American legends and her autobiographical pieces, showing the conflicts between her cultural traditions and assimilation into white culture.  Many of these pieces were published in Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly.  The second period is from 1916 to 1924.  These are her political works.  Zitkala-Ša and her family had moved to Washington, D.C., and Zitkala-Ša became increasingly political on behalf of Native Americans and women.

            Some of Zitkala-Ša’s most influential works are from this second period.  American Indian Stories was published in 1921.  She was also co-author of 1923’s Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery.  Her co-authors were Charles H. Fabens, from the American Indian Defense Association, and Matthew K. Sniffen of the Indian Rights Association.  Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians exposed “the corrupt land allocation policies in place at the time in Oklahoma” (10).  This work “resulted in her appointment as an advisor to the U.S. government’s Meriam Commission of 1928, the findings of which eventually led to several important reforms” (11) and influenced Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

            Zitkala-Ša’s writings were “the first major literary pieces written by a Native American in English that deal with Native American culture and the process of assimilation from an Indian’s point of view” (12).  She’s so interesting.  I’m going to have to read some of her writings now, many of which are available online.      

1 - Pinterest caption

2, 3, 6, 7, 9 - Zitkala-Sa

4, 5, 8 - Zitkala-sa, Sioux Indian

10, 12 - Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

11 - Zitkala-Sa, Encyclopædia Brittanica

Elihu Palmer

            When I have no idea what to write about, or am coming up with too many ideas and can’t narrow them down, I ask other people what or who they would want me to look up and write about.  That’s how I did the Eastern State Penitentiary piece (hi mom!) and that’s how we have today’s post, courtesy of my husband.  Today’s is tricky (I think that’s part of why he picked it).  I fully admit that I usually start by Googling the topic or looking at Wikipedia.  I always try and find that information elsewhere, but Wikipedia is actually a pretty good place to start for basic information; some of their articles are even starred or locked, showing their accuracy.  Today’s topic, Elihu Palmer, had a stub on Wikipedia.  Oooookay…  Everywhere I looked had similar information, but with some extra tidbits here and there, so we’re going to see how well I pulled something together from little information.

            Elihu Palmer was born in 1764 in Canterbury, Connecticut.  That’s about all we known about him until he was in his twenties.  Already having issues learning about him…  When he was growing up, though, we know what was going on in the country.  We weren’t the United States yet, but we were getting there.  The country would be founded without explicit religion, and with the idea that all religions could be practiced free of persecution.  Many of the Founding Fathers were deists, believing that the natural world and reason and observation were all one needed to determine if there was a god or not.

            Unitarianism was also gaining in popularity at this time.  Unitarianism is a branch of Protestantism that believes in one god, not the Trinity like Catholics believe in.  They also believe that Jesus is not God himself, but human, though could possibly still be considered a savior.  In 1782 the first recognized Unitarian church opened in the United States in Boston, Massachusetts.  Unitarians were a very liberal branch of Christianity and the Enlightenment helped their beliefs gain popularity.  All of this is to say that even among ministers, some very radical ideas were emerging, and some of them broke with religion altogether.

            Elihu Palmer studied to be a Presbyterian minister at Dartmouth, and graduated in 1787, taking a position in what is now Queens in New York.  Within a year, though, Palmer was dismissed from his position.  In 1789, he moved to Philadelphia and joined a Baptist Church.  Ultimately, though, the Baptists too kicked him out.  In both of these cases, it seems that Palmer had begun speaking in more deist terms, and against the divinity of Jesus.  Palmer then “became somewhat of a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wanderer” (1).

            Palmer wound up in New York City where he became a Universalist, but also publicly rejected Jesus’s divinity, which wasn’t part of Universalist beliefs.  Palmer and his wife worked for deism and his ideas began to gain traction.  He even planned speeches challenging Jesus’s divinity, and published ads for them in the local papers (2).  With all of his outspokenness though, Palmer and his followers were banned from Philadelphia.

            Palmer decided to become a lawyer, and passed the Pennsylvania bar in 1793.  Despite having been banned, he returned to Philadelphia.  This was a fateful decision.  In 1793, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia.  Over five thousand people died, Palmer’s wife being one of those who died.  Palmer survived, but was blinded.  “His enemies naturally saw his blindness as God’s punishment for heresy” (3), even though there were many religious people who died in the epidemic as well.

            After his blinding, Palmer couldn’t practice law anymore, and so became a travelling lecturer for deism.  His first stop was in Augusta, Georgia and he was received favorably, or at least cordially.  Georgia had based their separation of church and state rules on Virginia’s religious freedom act (4).  While in Augusta, Palmer also helped to collect “materials for Dr. Jedidiah Morse’s ‘Geography’” (5); Morse wrote geography textbooks, and his son would create Morse Code.

            After lecturing in Georgia, Palmer moved back to Philadelphia, and then on to New York, still lecturing throughout the East Coast.  Palmer’s first speech in New York took place on Christmas Day.  Palmer believed this was a day “well suited to the denunciation of both Christianity and Christ” (6).  In New York in 1796, Palmer formed the Deistical Society of New York.

            Palmer was an extreme deist, though, holding positions that many did not.  He believed that “the flawed teachings of Jesus were responsible for Christianity’s sordid history” (7) and that belief in supernatural experiences “undermines nature’s principles and furthers human misery by setting up unreasonable expectations” (8).  He believed in natural philosophy and criticized institutional Christianity.  Palmer was a close friend of Thomas Paine, but his beliefs were much more extreme than Paine’s.  Paine believed there were still ethical things in the New Testament and that there was virtue in the teachings of Jesus (9).  The two wrote similarly though, being incredibly honest about their beliefs and pulling no punches.   Palmer, though, didn’t care about what others believed if they were against his beliefs.

            Despite his abrasiveness, Palmer was popular and was important for secularism in the young country.  Deism was largely seen as only for educated and/or upper-class people.  Palmer brought deism down to a level that was accessible for everyone.  The Deistical Society he formed in New York, as well as in Philadelphia and Baltimore, had members that were shopkeepers and artisans.  “With the exception of doctors, almost no members of learned professions were recorded as members” (J).  Palmer founded two newspapers in 1800 and 1803; the only reason the papers had to stop publication was because the subscribers couldn’t pay their bills on time, not because there was a lack of subscribers.

            In addition to his speeches, Palmer wrote.  He wrote the speeches he gave, he wrote pieces for his and others’ newspapers, and he wrote a book, Principles of Nature, published first in 1801.  In Principles of Nature, Palmer reiterated his belief that “‘the world in infinitely worse’ for following Jesus” (10).  Palmer believed it was the “nonreligious advances in human thought” (11) which led to the creation of the printing press and eventually to the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions.  He believed the Enlightenment had allowed for the enfranchisement of men “who had never before been considered fit to govern themselves” (12).

            Principles of Nature had sold out three editions by the time of Palmer’s death in 1806 at 42 while on a speaking tour.  Upon his death, his widow (he remarried shortly after the death of his first wife) was left without property or money and only made due with the help of Thomas Paine.  Principles of Nature was still being published after Palmer’s death.  In 1819, the London publisher Richard Carlile published it with help from his wife while he was in prison for having published other scandalous or heretical books.  In 1824, two booksellers went to prison for three years each for selling Principles of Nature and The Age of Reason.

            That’s Elihu Palmer.  Still not a whole lot of information about him, but I’ve tried to do the best I could.  Even though we don’t know a lot about him personally, and his seeming abrasiveness led to some unpopularity, I think he’s important to know and know about.  Like mentioned earlier, he helped bring deism and Enlightenment ideas to those who maybe hadn’t heard of it.  He laid foundations for freethinking and secularism in the United States, even if we don’t know his name.  I’m glad my husband suggested him. 

1, 5 - Elihu Palmer

2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12 - Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holtand Company, 2004).

7, 10 - Elihu Palmer

8 - Palmer, Elihu

Sigrid Undset

            Apologies for the lack of post last week.  I was behind to begin with, I got halfway through typing up my notes but I was feeling horrible, and wound up spending all day in bed instead of doing anything at all productive. L  But here we are this week with the post I should’ve written for last week.  Hopefully that won’t happen again.

            This week we have a Nobel Prize winner in literature for a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while (I finally picked it up last weekend!), Sigrid Undset.  Sigrid was born at her mother’s childhood home in Kalundborg, Denmark on May 20, 1882.  She was the oldest of three daughters of Charlotte Undset (née Anna Maria Charlotte Gyth) and Ingvald Martin Undset, a Norwegian architect.  When Sigrid was two, her family moved to Kristiana, Norway (what is now Oslo; the name changed in 1925).

            When Sigrid was eleven, her father died after a prolonged illness.  This put the family in financial trouble, and Sigrid had to give up her hopes of going to university.  Instead, Sigrid enrolled in a one year secretarial course, and at age sixteen went to work for an engineering company in Kristiana; she would work there for ten years.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid was writing fiction.  When she was sixteen she had started a novel set in Denmark in the Middle Ages.  This was completed by age twenty-two, but it was turned down by the publishers she approached.  Two years later, Sigrid had a new manuscript; it was only eighty pages and was set in contemporary Kristiana, focusing on a middle-class woman.  This too was turned down at first, but was then published.  The work, Fru Maria Oulie, created a stir upon its publication; the opening line reads “I have been unfaithful to my husband” and scandalized its readers with its frank discussion of adultery.

            The publication of Fru Maria Oulie made Sigrid Undset a “promising young author in Norway” (1).  In 1907 she joined the Norwegian Authors’ Union; in the 1930s she would head their Literary Council and was one of their chairmen as well.

            From the time Fru Maria Oulie was published in 1907 until 1919, Sigrid wrote about life in contemporary Kristiana, “about the city and its inhabitants,” “working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children” (2).  She focused a lot on women and who and how they loved.  In 1911 Jenny was published, and in 1914 Varren (Spring) was published.  All of her works sold well immediately, and after her third book was published, she was able to quit her office job to write full time.

            Sigrid was given a writer’s scholarship and travelled throughout Europe.  She went to Denmark, Germany, and Italy, where she spent nine months in Rome.  Her parents had loved Rome and she spent her time travelling to all the same places she knew her parents had visited.  In Rome there was a group of Scandinavian writers and artists and Sigrid made friends with them.

            In Rome in 1909, Sigrid met the Norwegian painter Anders Castus Svarstad.  He was nine years older, and was married with three children, but they fell in love.  They waited three years for Anders’s divorce to finalize, and then married in 1912.  They travelled to London for six months and then came back to Rome where their first child was born in January 1913.  The child was a boy, named for his father.  By 1919, Sigrid had had another child, a mentally handicapped daughter, and had taken in Anders’s other three children, including a mentally handicapped son.

            Throughout this time, Sigrid continued writing, working on more novels and some short stories.  She also entered public debates, critical of women’s issues, and the moral and ethical issues she saw that had led to the First World War.

            In late 1919, Sigrid moved to Lillehammer, Norway with her two children, and pregnant with her third.  The plan was for Sigrid to rest in Lillehammer while hers and Anders’ home was being built in Kristiana.  However, the marriage broke up and the couple divorced before their home was completed.  Sigrid stayed in Lillehammer and her third child was born there in August of that year.

            Within two years, though, the home that was being built was completed.  Bjerkebæk was a large home with traditional Norwegian architecture.  It had a “large fenced garden with views of the town and the villages around” (3).

While the home was being completed, Sigrid worked on a Norwegian retelling of the King Arthur myth.  She also “studied Old Norse manuscripts and Medieval chronicles and visited and examined Medieval monasteries, both at home and abroad”, becoming “an authority on the period … and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages” (4).  Her works are “precise, realistic, and never romanticized” (5), showing true human emotions, just set in a different time period.  By using the Middle Ages, she was able to give herself the necessary distance, but also allowed for her admiration of Medieval Christendom.

The work this research led to is Krisin Lavransdatter, a trilogy published between 1920 and 1922.  The trilogy shows “life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, portrayed through the experiences of a woman from birth until death” (6).  In addition to the attention to detail about the historical period she was writing about, Sigrid employed modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness in Kristin Lavransdatter; these were cut out of the first English translations of the work though.

Around this same period, Sigrid became a Catholic.  Her parents had been atheists and her upbringing was secular, though living in a Lutheran country she had been baptized and had attended Lutheran church growing up.  With the outbreak of the First World War and the break-up of her marriage, Sigrid had had a crisis of faith, and Catholicism was the answer for her.  In 1924, at age 42, Sigrid was received into the Catholic Church and also became a lay Dominican.

Sigrid’s conversion was scandalous at the time in Norway.  As mentioned, Norway was a Lutheran country; almost no one practiced Catholicism.  There was also a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the country at the time.  As an author, Sigrid was also part of the intelligentsia at the time.  They too didn’t accept her though, being mostly socialist and communist themselves.  Sigrid was open about her Catholicism though, defending the Catholic Church in public debates.

Her next work after Kristin Lavransdatter was Olav Audunssøn (translated in English as The Master of Hestviken).  Olav, a four volume novel, was written during her conversion and published right after; it takes place during a time period when Norway was a Catholic country.  After Olav, Sigrid went back to writing contemporary books, set in Oslo and “with a strong Catholic element” (7).  In 1928 Sigrid won the Nobel Prize for Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages” (8).

Following this, Sigrid was translating the Icelandic Sagas into Modern Norwegian and writing literary essays on English literature, mainly on the Brontës and D. H. Lawrence.  In 1934 she published Eleven Years Old, an autobiographical piece about her childhood in Kristiana.  In the 1930s she was also starting a new historical piece, this time to be set in eighteenth century Scandinavia, but only one volume was published before World War Two broke out.  After the war Sigrid was too broken herself to finish writing it.

With World War Two came a lot of changes in Sigrid’s part of the world.  Stalin invaded Finland; Sigrid donated her Nobel Prize to the Finnish war effort.  In 1940 Germany invaded Norway.  Throughout the 1930s Sigrid had been critical of Hitler, and so fled Norway upon the German invasion.  She and her son first went to Sweden and then to the United States; they lived in Brooklyn and she pleaded for help for her country and for the Jews.  In 1940, also, her oldest son, Anders, was killed in battle (her daughter had died before the war broke out).

After World War Two ended, Sigrid returned to Norway, but never wrote again.  Sigrid Undset died in Lillehammer on June 10, 1949 at age 67.  She is buried in Mesnali, east of Lillehammer.  The son and daughter that predeceased her are buried there as well; there are three black crosses marking their graves.

Sigrid Undset has been honored in many ways.  In addition to the Nobel Prize in 1928, there is a crater on Venus named Undset for her.  She was on the 500 kronur note and a 1982 2 kronur postage stamp in Norway.  In 1998, Sweden put her on a stamp as well.  Her home of Bjerkebæk is now a part of the Maihaugen museum.

            The book I finally got of Sigrid Undset’s is Kristin Lavransdatter, but now I’m interested in her other works.  I think her books about contemporary Norway would be really interesting, reading about how Norway was in the early twentieth century, especially Fru Maria Oulie and its controversial opening line.  I’m also now interested in her more Catholic novels, though I’d wait and read those after I’d read her earlier works.  (While I love Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I wish I had read it after I’d read his earlier works.  He went through a similar conversion to Catholicism and it becomes more and more prevalent in his works.)  I hope I’ve inspired you all to go find some Sigrid Undset books as well!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – Sigrid Undset

8 – Nobel Laureates in Literature

Agatha Christie

            This post came a bit last minute (so it should be shorter at least!).  I was researching someone else (they’ll be up next week), and then realized that it was almost the birthday of the other person I’d considered for this week, as in, this person would have turned 125 tomorrow.  So, I changed my plan and rushed to finish this.  So Happy Day-Early Birthday to Agatha Christie, one of my favorites.

           Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, England on September 15, 1890.  Her family was comfortably middle class, and her father, an American, homeschooled Agatha; her mother, Clara, didn’t want Agatha to learn to read until she was eight.  Agatha was the only child in the house (she had two older siblings, but “was a much loved ‘after thought’” (1)) and was bored, so she taught herself to read by age five.

            Agatha read children’s stories that were popular at the time, including E. Nesbit and Louisa May Alcott, but also read poetry and “thrillers from America” (2).  When Agatha was five, her family spent some time in France; this is when Agatha first learned French.  When Agatha was eleven, her father died after a number of heart attacks.

            When Agatha was eighteen, she began writing short stories; some of these would be published in the 1930s after serious revisions.  Two years later, Agatha traveled with her mother to Cairo for her mother’s health.  They stayed for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel.  During this period Agatha went to house parties galore and had a number of marriage proposals, none of which she accepted.

            In 1912, Agatha met Archie Christie, an aviator with the Royal Flying Corps.  They had a whirlwind romance, and wanted to marry, but neither had the money to make it possible.  When World War One broke out, Archie went to serve in France and Agatha worked at the Voluntary Aid Department at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay.  They decided not to put off marrying any longer, and married on Christmas Eve of 1914.  Archie returned to France on the 27^th.

            Throughout the war, Agatha and Archie didn’t see much of each other.  In January 1918, though, Archie was posted to the War Office in London, and so they were finally together again; this is when “Agatha felt her married life truly began” (3).

            Throughout the war, Agatha had been writing.  She started in earnest on a bet from her sister “that she couldn’t write a good detective story” (4), as well as to relieve some of the monotony at work.  Agatha would first develop her plot and then came up with her characters.  At this time she was working at the Hospital Dispensary.  She had had to take and pass a test from the Society of Apothecaries in order to get that position.  This gave her the background she needed when she would use poisons in her writing.  Her use of poison in her first book “was so well described that when the book was eventually published Agatha received an unprecedented honour for a writer of fiction – a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal” (5).

            This first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1919.  This was a big year for Agatha; in addition to the book’s publication, she and Archie moved to London, and their daughter Rosalind was born.  The publication of Styles came after having sent it to four other publishers.  This publisher, John Lane of Bodley Head, suggested a couple of changes to the book, including moving the resolution of the story from a courtroom to the, now famous, library.

            The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first book to feature Hercule Poirot, a Belgian former policeman.  During World War One, a lot of Belgian refugees came to England; this is why Agatha Christie made Poirot a Belgian refugee.

            After the war, Agatha continued writing.  Tommy and Tuppence Beresford and Miss Jane Marple soon followed Hercule Poirot.  Agatha kept writing, even while she was travelling with Archie, “promoting the Empire Exhibition of 1924” (6).  Agatha received news that The Secret Adversary (her second book, the first Tommy and Tuppence) would be published while she was in Cape Town.  (While in Cape Town, also, Agatha became the first British woman to surf standing up.)

            Agatha used inspiration from her travels with Archie, as well as people she knew.  For her fourth book, The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha based Sir Eustace Padlar on Archie’s boss.  For publication of this book, Agatha switched from Bodley Head to William Collins and Sons (now HarperColins).

            Around this time, Agatha and Archie returned to England to their daughter.  They named their new home in the suburbs of London, Styles, after her first book.  Shortly after this, Agatha’s life hit a hard spot.  Agatha’s mother died, leaving Agatha to empty out the family home in Torquay.  She was working on a novel at this point, but the strain of her mother’s death also strained her writing.

            At this same time, 1926, Archie fell in love with Nancy Neale.  Archie golfed, Nancy golfed, Agatha did not.  Agatha found out about Archie’s relationship with Nancy.  In early December of that year, Agatha left Rosalind with the maids at home and left.  Her car was found several miles away, and a nationwide search took place.  Finally she was found to have travelled from Kings Cross to Harrogate to the Harrogate Spa Hotel.  Agatha was staying at the hotel as Theresa Neale, from South Africa.  Luckily the staff at the hotel had recognized her and had called the police.  Agatha didn’t recognize Archie, and didn’t know who she was, when he came to get her; she had amnesia and possibly a concussion.  Agatha never spoke of this time with anyone.

            After her disappearance, Agatha separated from Archie.  She moved to London with Rosalind and with her secretary, Carlo.  She underwent psychological treatments at this time.  Agatha was struggling financially, and was having trouble writing.  Her brother-in-law suggested collecting some previously written Poirot short stories and publishing them; these short stories were published as The Big Four.

            In 1928, Agatha and Archie’s divorce was finalized, and Agatha went to the Canary Islands with Rosalind.  She finally finished The Mystery of the Blue Train, the story she had been struggling with after her mother’s death.  In late 1928, Giant’s Beard was published; this was her first book as Mary Westmacott.  Agatha would write six romances as Mary Westmacott (in addition to the sixty-six novels and fourteen collections of short stories as herself).

            In the autumn of 1928, Agatha finally travelled on the Orient Express, something she had always wanted to do.  She also travelled to Baghdad and to the archeological site at Ur, making friends with the Woolleys, the people who ran the site.  The following year, Agatha came back to the dig and met 25-year-old Max Mallowan, and archeologist in training.  Max showed Agatha around the site and “each found the other’s company relaxing” (7).

            Max and Agatha fell in love, their relationship “forged by travel” (8).  Max proposed to Agatha on the last night of his trip to Ashfield, her family home.  They were married on September 11, 1930.  Max and Agatha spent their summers at Ashfield, springs on archeological digs, and the rest of the year in London or at their home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

            Throughout most of her marriage to Max, Agatha was writing two or three books a year.  When they were on Max’s digs, she would write “a chapter or two during quiet mornings and helped out on site in the afternoon” (9).  Many of Agatha’s Middle Eastern themed or placed books came out of this period.

            In 1938, Agatha and Max bought Greenway House on the River Dart to replace Ashfield.  During World War Two, though, the home was taken over by Americans.  Agatha also worried they’d have to sell Greenway House in order to pay taxes.  During the war, Max was in Cairo, using his knowledge of languages to assist the war effort; Agatha stayed in London, doing much as she did during the First World War, volunteering at the dispensary at University College Hospital, and writing.  Agatha wrote N or M? as a patriotic gesture at this time, but the publication of the book was delayed so it didn’t quite have the effect she’d have liked.

            With Max gone, and there being so much less to do, Agatha’s output during the Second World War was prolific.  Between 1939 and 1945, Agatha published twelve books under both her name and as Mary Westmacott.  In 1946, her cover as Westmacott was blown and she stopped using that name; she had “enjoyed the freedom to write without the pressure of being Agatha Christie” (10).

            After the war, Agatha’s output slowed.  She had Max back, and the tax implications of her writing were just too much.  Throughout the rest of the 40s and 50s, she worked on theatrical productions, and less on books. (Though she would continue to publish throughout the rest of her life, she wasn’t putting out multiple books a year anymore, and some years would publish nothing.)

            One of her theatrical contributions was The Mousetrap.  Premiering in the West End on November 25, 1952, The Mousetrap is the world’s longest running play, never having ceased performance since then.  It has been performed over 25,000 times.

           Agatha’s last public appearance was at the premiere for the 1974 film of Murder on the Orient Express, with Albert Finney.  Agatha liked the film but thought Poirot’s mustaches “weren’t luxurious enough” (11).

            Agatha Christie Mallowan died on January 12, 1976.  She is buried at St. Mary’s, Cholsey, near Wallingford.

            Agatha Christie holds a number of records for her works.  As mentioned, The Mousetrap is the world’s longest running play.  She’s also in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best selling novelist of all time, with over two billion copies of her books in print.  She is the world’s third most-published author, behind only Shakespeare and the Bible.  She is the most translated individual, having been translated into 103 languages.  And And Then There Were None (first published in 1939) is the best selling mystery novel in the world, and one of the best selling books ever, with 100 million sales.

            That’s Agatha Christie, quick and not super in depth, but hopefully fun.  I love Agatha Christie, I love Poirot (David Suchet forever!) and Miss Marple.  I wanted to do something about her for her 125^th birthday, and so many other events in her life happened in September, I thought why not.  I’ll probably wind up rereading some Agatha Christie tomorrow, or maybe finally read The Mysterious Affair at Styles (surprisingly hard to track down…).  Happy early birthday, Agatha!

1, 2, 3 - Agatha Christie, Childhood

4, 5, 6 - Agatha Christie, Poirot is Born

7, 8, 9 - Agatha Christie, A New Start

10, 11 - Agatha Christie, Autumn