Definitely my favorite of the lot. The plot flowed the best of the three novellas, and I finally began to feel a modicum of empathy for Kristin (could be my fault lol).
Her character arc reached its peak in this one, and it only happened through so. Much. Sorrow. An apt description of the spiritual life and true Christian living.

“As she said five Ave Marias in memory of the painful mysteries of the Redemption, she felt that it was with her sorrows that she dared to seek shelter under the cloak of the Mother of God. With her grief over the children she had lost, with the heavier sorrows over all the fateful blows that had struck her sons without her being able to ward them off. Mary, the perfection of purity, of humility, of obedience to the will of her Father—she had grieved more than any other mother, and her mercy would see the weak and pale glimmer in a sinful woman's heart, which had burned with a fiery and ravaging passion, and all the sins that belong to the nature of love: spite and defiance, hardened relentlessness, obstinacy, and pride. And yet it was still a mother's heart.”

“Lord, if only you would give me this and this and this, then I will thank you and ask for nothing more except for this and this and this. ...
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road's end.

She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.”

“She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross.”

“Her heart burst with a feeling of oneness with these destitute and suffering people, among whom God had placed her; she prayed in a surge of sisterly tenderness for all those who were poor as she was and who suffered as she herself had suffered.

‘I will rise up and go home to my Father.’”

The final novel in the Kristin Lavransdatter series held even more complexity and ethical questions than the first two. I loved the final portion of the novel, right up to its mournful ending. Undset does not play around with her historical context, let me tell you!

At some points, I felt Kristin connecting with another literary character--Mrs. Bennet. Though their stories (and personalities) are extremely different, at the same time, the two women find themselves married to men who do little to support their offsprings' futures, and as mothers they must shift alone, ridiculed by the world while their headstrong children make mistakes. And that's where the similarities end. Mr. Bennet does lift a finger here and there, and Pride and Prejudice ends neatly and happily. The seven sons of Erlend and Kristin, on the other hand, go their own ways.

I felt for the character of Kristin even more than I had been in the first two books. She suffered so much while growing so strong, and yet she was outcast by society because of choices she did not make. There are so many layers there. If I was picking one volume of this series to analyze, I'd pick this one. You can trace the effects of Kristin's choices (and the ways in which she was manipulated) to the very end. I also liked how Undset explored heredity, and the capacity of mothers to take the blame for the sins of their children.

I would definitely revisit this series in the future, after reading more by Undset. I love her characterizations, vivid sense of place and time, and the way she explores religion in this series. These books have been on my list for nearly a decade and I had three or four false starts. I am glad I stuck with it this time and finally summited this Norwegian mountain.

There is so much misery in this third volume, and such quiet beauty in the last few pages. I am glad to have read it. Much of sin (we are all far more sinful than we imagine) and of grace.