It was at this time that Sigrid Undset first realized she wanted to be a serious writer. She had written puppet plays and little stories for her sisters, but she had a talent for drawing and she had always dreamed of being a painter, not a writer. Now she put her sketchbook aside as she read Chaucer and Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley, the sagas, and legends of the saints. She studied Latin and Greek late into the night. In a letter to her Swedish pen pal Dea （Andrea Hedberg）， Sigrid wrote that she had discovered in herself an “artist’s temperament,” which she found somewhat unsettling: There’s nothing I have greater contempt for than “artiness,” and especially for those useless creatures who possess the type of artistic temperament that produces nothing, who are artists for their own sakes, which means that they possess only the “introspective” characteristics of the artistic temperament: egotism, a lack of ability and desire to work, a lack of interest in and love for others, as well as a wild imagination, so they dream away their time… [But] I can no longer rein in my desire to dream, nor do I have any wish to do so. I spend all of my spare time wandering along the country roads and playing with my fantasies, scraps of made-up novels, images from my dreams, and memories of landscapes from past summers.
In 1900 she began work on a story set in 1340 about Svend Tr?st and Agnete, historical figures she first encountered in the work of the Danish author Bernhard Severin Ingemann. Two years later, she had abandoned this story but was writing another, set in the late 14th century in Kalundborg.
In 1904 Sigrid Undset took her completed manuscript to Gyldendal Publishing Company in Copenhagen, and a month later she received the fateful reply from editor Peter Nansen: “Don’t attempt any more historical novels. You have no talent for it. But you might try writing something modern. You never know.”
This assessment was a crushing blow to the young writer, but it also provoked the stubborn side of her nature. She accepted his words as a challenge; she did not give up. Continuing with her tedious secretarial duties at the electrical company, Sigrid Undset used her free hours to work on a “modern” novel about marital infidelity, entitled Fru Marta Oulie, which she finished in 1906. This time she submitted her manuscript to the Norwegian publishing house of H. Aschehoug & Co. Their reader advised against publication because there were already plenty of such “everyday” stories in print. Sigrid’s sister then sent the manuscript to the well-known Norwegian playwright Gunnar Heiberg, who responded enthusiastically. With his intercession, Undset’s novel was finally published—by Aschehoug—to good reviews, and it sold unexpectedly well. The career of a new author was launched.
To celebrate the publication of her daughter’s first novel, Charlotte Undset gave Sigrid a volume of poetry by the great nineteenth-century Danish writer Steen Steensen Blicher inscribed with the admonition: “You as a writer must always look up to Blicher as your mentor, be as incorruptibly honest as he is, look life fearlessly in the eye, see it as it is, and truthfully tell what you see.”
In 1908, Undset’s second book appeared: Den lykkelige alder （The Happy Age）， which included two stories about young office workers like herself. This book met with even greater success and won the author a solid place in contemporary Norwegian literature. She could finally quit her job at the electrical company and turn her full attention to writing.
Then, five years after editor Nansen had proclaimed her unsuitable as an author of historical works, Undset published the short novel Fort?llingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis （translated into English under the title Gunnar’s Daughter）。 With this sagalike narrative she returned to the period that compelled her most: the Middle Ages. And yet it would be another decade before she was able to make full use of her detailed knowledge of the era in a passionate story of love, loyalty, and betrayal: Kransen （The Wreath）， the first volume of Kristin Lavransdatter. Before Sigrid Undset could even begin work on her epic masterpiece, her life underwent dramatic changes.
In 1909, while traveling in Italy on a grant, she met and fell in love with Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter thirteen years her senior. Coincidentally, as a nineteen-year-old office worker, Sigrid had bought one of his paintings from a gallery in Oslo. Svarstad was a married man with three children, and it would take him more than two years to disentangle himself from his first wife and get a divorce. In June 1912, Anders Svarstad and Sigrid Undset were finally married at the Norwegian consulate in Antwerp, Belgium.
Over the next ten years, the marriage began to founder. The couple had three children of their own, and Sigrid was determined to look after her stepchildren as well. But the combined incomes of a painter and a writer were not enough to support such a large family, and Svarstad spent most of his time in his Oslo studio, leaving the household concerns to his wife. It also soon became clear that their daughter, Maren Charlotte （called Mosse）， suffered from severe mental retardation. Sigrid tried valiantly to hold the marriage together, but in the end she had to admit defeat. The financial and psychological strain became too much, and she eventually moved to Lillehammer with her daughter and two sons. Over the years, her husband and stepchildren were frequent visitors to her home, which she named Bjerkeb?k, but they would never live together as a family again. When Undset converted to Catholicism in 1924, the marriage was annulled, on the grounds that the Church did not recognize Svarstad’s divorce from his first wife.