Influences on Undset

Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson, convert, priest and novelist

Sigrid Undset's stridency in writing on subjects pertaining to religion and the Catholic faith was a characteristic shared by many Catholic commentators throughout the period of post- Reformation Catholicism until the advent of the Second Vatican Council. Particularly in those places where the state religion was Protestant and Catholics were in a minority, lay Catholic intellectuals and leading cultural lights who had embraced the Church as converts took delight in their new-found counter-cultural beliefs and practices. In Literary Converts, Joseph Pearce writes of scores of conversions among the intelligentsia in Britain, a phenomenon replicated elsewhere: “In Europe there was a major influx of literary converts as impressive as that experienced in England. These included François Mauriac, Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, Charles Péguy, Henri Ghéon, Giovanni Papini, Gertrud von le Fort and Sigrid Undset, all of whom were either converts or reverts, Catholics who had lost their faith but had returned to the Church”.

To demonstrate the breadth of Undset’s reading, it is sufficient to note that all of the above authors are found in her home library at Bjerkebæk, Lillehammer. Undset owned at least fifteen books of Mauriac, eleven of Maritain, five of Bloy, and four each of the Péguy, Ghéon, Papini and von le Fort.

While Undset kept abreast of Catholic thought on the continent, it was the English who had the greater influence on her. Her library contains over sixty books by G. K. Chesterton and over thirty by Hilaire Belloc and Robert Hugh Benson each. Chesterton and Benson made such an impression on Undset that within a few years of her conversion, she set about several translations for the benefit of her compatriots. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925) was translated in 1931 as the 450-page Den Evige Menneske and Benson’s Christ in the Church (1911) and The Friendship of Christ (1912) were rendered into Norwegian as Kristus i kirken (1926) and Kristi Venskap (1928) respectively.