without a doubt, so far, my favorite Undset novel

Possibly 4.5 stars.

A- Excellent but devastatingly sad book. A young talented female artist is living in Italy, a wonderfully free life to focus on art, friendship, and fun. After a young man pursues her, she falls in love. However, love on vacation does not work out in real life. As her lover proves to be controlling, and familiar issues get in the way, she falls into a romance with a rather unusual choice. Love and heartbreak destroys her life, and this heartbreaking story is sad, gorgeously written, and will haunt the reader for a while after.

It is a bit slow and difficult to read in the beginning. Should probably mention that I read the original norwegian version, I would imagine the english translation to be a bit easier. Despite this, Jenny really is an excellent book once you get into it. The last hundred pages or so are unbelievably intense, and the ending is quite shocking and unexpected. Also, Undset put so many beautiful images, you can almost feel like you are there, in Rome in the 1900s. This book really touched me, and I think it will stay with me forever.

I did not find this Undset novel set in her contemporary time as engaging as her seven novels of her Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken series set in the 13th and 14th Century. I will comment on the novel’s general issues, structure and style, hopefully, without revealing too many plot details.

The novel centers on the Norwegian artist Jenny and how she addresses such issues in her life as trying to be true to her painting career, what it means to be in love, how to deal with a tragic loss and when and who to love and/or engage in sex with. The novel follows Jenny from her time with fellow expatriate artists in Rome through Norway, Germany and back to Italy and Rome.

The manner in which the book’s issues were addressed was much more in the Zola realistic school than I anticipated. But rather than examining the harsh realities of the working and middle class, Undset examines the life issues among the artistic bohemian set whose members must be from the upper class as they always seemed to have sufficient money for living and travel.

Unlike with Kristin Lavransdatter, Jenny’s story and exploits never fully engaged me. I accepted Kristin L’s flaws because I understood her complex character with all its strengths and flaws. With Jenny, although she often talked about sex, love and art, I never quite understood her attitudes toward these subjects or why she chose to take certain actions. I tried to have sympathy for Jenny but her rationalization for some of her odd behavior choices really hindered my ability to maintain either empathy or sympathy for her.
.
The structure of the book also through me off at the beginning. During the novel’s early section set among the artistic set in Rome, if the book’s title hadn’t been Jenny. I would have thought the central character was Helge, another young Norwegian in Rome. However, after a spell the novel does get around to presenting Jenny as the main character while relegating Helge to a supporting player. It probably didn’t help that I was having the same problem with identifying the central character while concurrently reading Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, where the title character doesn’t even appear or is even mentioned in the first third of the book.

On the positive side, this novel, as usual with Undset, does have clear, lovely and descriptive writing. The writing was effective enough that I didn’t get bogged down even during some of the fairly head-scratching discussions on art or love. While my difficulty with relating to the characters and the structure make this a 3 star novel, I’ve moved it up to 4 stars because of the quality of Undset’s writing.

Like other reviewers, I enjoyed 'Jenny' very much. It is a very intelligent exploration of women's position in early twentieth century Europe. Since the 1970s women's equality has been a very real, live issue: even sexist men have to either justify their behaviour or defiantly scorn the idea of women's freedom. 'Jenny' was written at a time when the inferiority or at least the subservience of women was taken for granted: compared with now, it was hardly an issue at all. Sigrid Undset thinks herself out of this thought prison to give us a portrait of a woman who is trying to escape that prison by being true to the principles and 'privileges' that men have always taken for granted: independence and personal fulfilment. Ironically, Jenny's strength of character and her determination not to cede to suffocating social restrictions makes her irresistible to free-thinking men who all fall hopelessly in love with her. They all offer her support in her bid for freedom and independence as the price they are willing to pay for her love. What Sigrid Undset shows us - and I'm not even sure she is fully aware of it - is a woman who heroically opposes forces that in the end, and inevitably, prove too strong for her, and destroy her. It is the free-thinking men who are most interesting: they all want to possess Jenny; she has to fight against the temptation, the requirement, to give herself to one of them. The impulse to possess Jenny expresses itself in these men in subtle, insidious ways: they offer her devotion and protection. In effect, both of these are forms of possession.

Perhaps the most interesting of Jenny's lovers is a man old enough to be her father. He encourages her to value her freedom and independence as part of his strategy to control her. From a twenty-first century perspective we see through his motives probably even more clearly than Sigrid Undset, his creator, does: he is a seducer, groomer and a 'lamplighter', who in effect undermines her confidence in what she knows is right in order to break down her resistance to him.

Occasionally the novel becomes bogged down in social-philosophical musings that feel a bit artificial and over-done, but the accounts of Jenny's baby son and her final desperate decision are very powerful, shocking, heart-breaking. I'd like to read more of Sigrid Undset.

Dark. Introspective. Jenny moves from Norway to Rome to get away from her family and to develop her painting and is part of a group of ex-patriots who lived a fee, artistic life that in 1921 a vast majority of citizens called immoral. She ultimately betrays her own ambitions and ideals when she has an affair with the father of her boyfriend, has a baby who is born frail and dies after a few weeks, and finally gives in to the first boyfriend. A compelling and honest story.

I didn't grow up with this book, nor was I familiar with it, but when I was doing my 70s reading project last year, a friend on here suggested it, assuming it was a 70s read.

This middle grades novel was originally published in 1966, then reprinted in the 70s, but, sadly, it's out-of-print now (though I was able to get an inexpensive copy through Thrift books and I see that Amazon has several copies available right now).

It didn't qualify for last year's project, but I've wondered about this precious chapter book with a little girl and a Schipperke pup on the cover.

Turns out the author, Gene Inyart Namovicz (née Betty Gene Inyart), was a proud owner of Schipperkes (skip-per-kees), a dog breed made famous by Beatrix Potter in one of my favorite short stories of hers, “The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan.”



She was also a librarian and a mother of four, and I got tears in my eyes when I found her obituary online and read that she had always fancied herself a writer, but she wasn't sure that she had really made her mark, in that department. Apparently her “day job” as a librarian and the raising of four kids (and, of course, all of those dancing Schipperkes!) took so much of her time, she wondered about her creative work and if her writing had meant anything to anyone.

Well, I can't speak for anyone but my 12-year-old daughter and myself, but we can easily declare this book a complete delight. My youngest child is the harshest book critic (and food critic), at our house, and she didn't hesitate to give this story five stars. She told me that she felt as though she could read a few pages of it every day.

I felt exactly the same way. Jenny, published in the mid-1960s, isn't the least bit dated, and the story honors a precious time in history when children had freedom, safety, and no devices to distract them from the wholesome play and curiosity that growing human beings are meant to have.

I read this novel in its original language (Norwegian) and 16 year old me growing up in Trondheim, loved it. True to its realist form Undset adds sudden incidents of devastation and pain to the already melancholy plot. I still remember six years later. This was one of the great "marriage" novels in lieu of Undset's naturalist literary cousin Amalie Skram, that paved my lifelong affair with the genre.

Jenny is a budding artist in Rome. She meets and involves herself with men. Has a baby. The baby dies. End of novel. Maybe moves back to Norway, maybe not.

It is the closeness to the real experiences of women in Norway during her time that make the novel. As well as the precise and crisp language represents Undset´s prominent place within this genre and the novel´s place within Norwegian literary history and culture.

«Tror du den kilden, du snakker om — tror du den nogengang blir ren og klar igjen for en som vet, hun selv har grumset den op? Tror du, jeg har lettere for at resignere nu? — Jeg længtes efter det, som alle piker længtes efter. — Og jeg længes nu — efter det samme. Bare at jeg vet, nu har jeg en fortid bak mig som gjør, at jeg kan ikke ta mot den eneste lykke, jeg bryr mig om — for den skulde være frisk og sund og ren — og det er jeg ikke noget av nu mere —. Jeg skal bli ved at slæpe paa længsler, som jeg vet er umulige — mit liv skal det altsaa bety — det som jeg har oplevet disse sidste aarene —.»
«Jenny,» Gunnar reiste sig ogsaa. «Jeg sier allikevel, det kommer an paa dig selv — for det maa være slik. Om du vil, at disse minderne skal ødelægge dig. Eller om du vil ta dem som en lærepenge — saa grusomt haardt det høres —. At det maal, du hadde før dengang, mener jeg, var det rigtige — for dig.»
«Kan du da ikke skjønne, det er umulig, gut. Det er sunket ned i mig som en syre — det æter op det som var mit væsen engang — jeg føler selv, at jeg smuldrer op indvendig. — Aa. — Og jeg vil ikke, jeg vil ikke —. Og jeg faar lyst til — jeg vet ikke —. Faa alle tankerne til at holde op. Dø —. Eller leve — noget vanvittig, avskylig, — gaa tilbunds i en elendighet, som er endda dypere end denne —. La mig traakke ned i sølen saa grundig, at jeg vet, efter dette er slutten —. Eller —» hun talte lavt og vildt, som i kvalte skrik — «hive mig under et jernbanetog — vite i de sidste sekunder, at nu — nu straks — er hele min krop, nerver og hjerte og hjerne — altsammen — maset til en eneste skjælvende, blodig klump —.»

Jenny is the first book I've read by Undset that doesn't explicitly discuss religion. This is spectacular writing, the perspective narrator shifts several times, seemlesly. The descriptions of natural scenes are careful and precise, but never feel too long, and she doesn't try to beat you over the head with hidden metaphors therein, or anything of that sort.
Perhaps my favorite theme is the tension between personal values, and the difficulty in meeting them, and most importantly of all, the longing that exists within that tension. The last chapter reads as a beautiful and tender meditation on yearning itself as continually unfulfilled desire.

We meet Jenny, a young, well she is 28, painter in Rome. There she meets a young student of archeology, Helge, who at first seems to like her friend Francesca better but after a while convinces himself to some degree that he is in love with Jenny. And with her it is much the same. She is strong and independent but then not that strong and independent. She longs to love and be loved. And so she thinks she might be in love with the young man. She is even prepared to let the love develop into something physical. But he declines the offer. We are before the First World War. So even if the novel is surprisingly modern in some ways, it is still a world away from ours.

She goes back to Norway and meets the parents of Helge. First the mother who is as unhappy as she is unsympathetic. And then the father who visits her in her atelier. The father does not want the mother to know. Helge when he returns is not amused. They brake up and poor Jenny now lets father become her lover. She gets pregnant and now realizes that perhaps the love for the father is not entirely satisfying either.

The child dies and now she gets really depressed. There is another guy called Gunnar who I thought would become eventually the husband she deserves and in due time he proposes. But that would have been a solution too obvious and wrong.

One thing that is fascinating is how Undset manages to portray all of her protagonists in a way that you do not like them. Maybe with the one exception of Gunnar. I could not say what about Helge it is that makes you think from the very beginning, please Jenny, not him. But his father with his patronizing way (as suits his age) is not much better. The mother simply horrible, Francesca superficial.

The message of the book is stated by Helge. We are responsible ourselves for all the misfortune in our lives. Jenny wants to be a painter but then she realizes she also wants to love and as she admits to herself she is prepared to forget the demands on herself and take what she can get.

Are men different? Can they live for their work alone? It is the role of Gunnar to do a lot of philosophizing about this. (And also very about the importance of classical languages and education for example) Women, he thinks, do not have a soul. Even the best of them, like Jenny, hope they will meet half way through a man to help them. And Jenny agrees. Helge’s father on the other hand, who is a failed artist himself, disagrees. There are men too for whom life is without meaning.

The prose of the book is rather stilted and as is often the case, you wish the people in the book would do some real work. But all in all a pleasure to read.