Marta Oulie

« "Like those two other great European novels of adultery, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Anna Karenina, Marta Oulie traces the interior life of a woman from the beautiful and expansive rush of her first love, to her swelling dissatisfaction with her ‘doll's house’ existence constrained by turn-of-the-nineteenth-century values, her growing distance from her adoring husband, her unconsidered entry into an affair, and finally to her ultimate disillusion, self-recrimination, and despair. Thanks to Tiina Nunnally’s nuanced translation, we can experience this strangely compelling novel in all the precise observations of Undset’s original Norwegian text."

—Susan Vreeland, author of Clara and Mr. Tiffany and Luncheon of the Boating Party»

«A vote of gratitude is due to the University of Minnesota Press for bringing us, for the first time in English, this impeccably translated edition of Undset's early and remarkable novella." —John Banville
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«Most of Undset’s later novels—including the medieval epic “Kristin Lavransdatter,” which earned her the Nobel Prize—took their cue from this blunt début, dealing in various ways with the social and familial constraints of women." —The New Yorker

"It’s unsurprising that Undset won a Nobel Prize for Literature, and I’m shocked that it took this long to become more widely known in the United States. I’d compare it to Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or even The Scarlet Letter in its intensity." —Off the Book

"Undset’s writing is vivid, engaging, and fast moving. Never before published in English, this translation by Tiina Nunnally is clear, stark and gripping." —The Chronicle-Journal»