As one of Undset’s biographers, Borghild Krane, surmises, “Perhaps this marriage illustrates the difficulties that arise when two people marry who both have such a strong and imperative need for artistic development that for each of them it becomes an activity so essential to life that it cannot be stopped—even if it takes them away from each other.”
During all the years of her marital struggles, Sigrid Undset continued to write, maintaining the habit she had adopted during her office days of staying up late into the night. She wrote book reviews and newspaper articles. She also published two more modern novels, as well as a collection of essays on feminist issues—a concern which would claim her lifelong interest, although her written positions were often in direct contradiction to her own life choices. In 1915 she published Fort?llinger om Kong Arthur og ridderne av det runde bord （Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table）。 She immersed herself in the works of Shakespeare, Thackeray, Thomas More, and Dickens. She continued her studies of the lives of the saints and started writing essays on religious topics. The growing income from her books allowed Undset to hire two women to help her with the children and household. And at last she began work on a story that she had been thinking about for a long time, the life story of a willful young woman named Kristin Lavransdatter.
The early fourteenth century, which Sigrid Undset chose for her narrative, was a time of transition in Norway, when the Church and the Crown were solidifying their power. It was a time with few major historical figures, which allowed Undset more freedom to create her own. It was also a time of relative calm in Norway—a period between wars and before the onset of the Black Death in 1349, which would wipe out at least half the population of the country （and which plays a significant part in the third volume of Undset’s story）。
By this time the Catholic Church had become firmly established in Norway, and it played an increasingly powerful role in daily life. Like the majority of her peers, Sigrid Undset had been brought up Lutheran, although she received little formal religious instruction from her parents. And yet from a young age she had been drawn to the teachings of the Catholic Church, both intellectually and spiritually. In Kristin Lavransdatter she was able to explore her religious ideas and examine how the Catholic faith directly affected the lives of ordinary individuals.
In the early fourteenth century the entire population of Norway numbered less than 500,000 and the country was almost completely rural, with few outside influences reaching the villages in remote mountain valleys. Daily life revolved not only around religious rituals and obligations, but around the family and extended kin group. The rules for leading a good life were clearly delineated and solidly entrenched. Those who strayed or disobeyed were outlawed or exiled from the community. To lose the approval of the Church and your kinsmen was the worst imaginable fate; to be cast out was a punishment just short of death.
This was the society that Undset chose for her story of an intelligent but headstrong young woman, properly brought up and fully aware of the expectations of her parents and kinsmen, a young woman well versed in the strictures of the Church. And yet Kristin decides to defy both her parents and her priest for the sake of passion and love. She listens to her heart rather than to all those around her. Kristin’s act of rebellion might be viewed as foolhardy or courageous, but in either case, she has to suffer the consequences of her actions. She must learn to take responsibility for her own fate.
Sigrid Undset later explained that Kristin’s greatest sin is not the fact that she succumbs to her sexual desires and yields to the amorous demands of her impetuous suitor before they are properly married. Of much greater import is Kristin’s decision to thwart her father’s wishes, to deny the traditions of her ancestors, and to defy the Church; her worst sin is that of pride. The scholar Marlene Ciklamini notes that “in medieval times the most egregious sin was superbia, or pride, setting oneself up as the arbiter of things human and divine, or, to express it another way, loving oneself more than God.” Kristin’s constant struggle to integrate a sense of spiritual humility into her strong and passionate nature underlies much of the dramatic tension in all three volumes of the novel.
The Wreath was published in the fall of 1920, and the critics gave it their highest praise. Gunnar Heiberg, whose intervention had prompted the publication of Undset’s first novel, compared The Wreath to the works of Homer, saying it demonstrated the same “power, clarity, and depth.”
The novel quickly won acclaim in other countries as well. When it first appeared in English, the Times of London called Undset “a creator of characters on the grand scale.” The New York Times pronounced the novel “a well-written, well-constructed, strong and dramatic romance, founded upon those emotions and impulses which belong not to any especial time or country, but to all humanity.” And the critic Edwin Bjorkman wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Undset’s “supreme achievement is in the appealing humanity and fallibility of her characters.”