"Positioning Undset has been a difficult task for researchers, because her Catholicism and realism fall outside the liberal-national, feminist and modernist literary canon that accounts for most of Norwegian literature."*
And that's what I love about her!
*Liv Bliksrud, “Sigrid Undset: Prize for Literature, 1928”, in Olav Njølstad (ed.), Norske nobelprisvinnere: Fra Bjørnson til Kydland (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2005), p. 187.
I'm reading her Escape to the Future at the moment. It's so different to her historical fiction but nonetheless a great read. I'm amazed that for something published in 1942, she didn't get knocked off for what she said about the Germans and Russians.