Kristin Lavransdatter

As a girl in fourteenth century Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter is devoted to her father Lavrans and to the strict, loving household he runs in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, and the trilogy's first volume follows her from that childhood into open defiance of him: betrothed to the steady, unexciting Simon Darre, she falls hard instead for Erlend Nikulaussøn, a magnetic, reckless landowner already excommunicated for living openly with another man's wife. Kristin gets her way, but only after becoming pregnant before the wedding, a sin she conceals from her own father for the rest of his life, and the marriage that follows never fully escapes the damage that lie and Erlend's own carelessness keep doing to it. The second and third volumes carry Kristin through decades as mistress of Erlend's estate at Husaby, raising seven sons, absorbing his two children by another woman without complaint, and slowly discovering that the man she chose over duty cannot manage land, money or political loyalty with anything like her own competence.

Erlend's involvement in a failed plot against the king costs the family Husaby outright, and Kristin, furious and unable to forgive him for a ruin she blames entirely on his weakness, drives him into an estrangement neither of them repairs before he dies defending her honor in a fight he did not have to enter, receiving no last rites. Widowed and aging, Kristin gives away what remains of her wealth and enters a convent as a lay sister, where she spends her final years nursing plague victims during the Black Death and dies performing exactly the kind of quiet, physical service to others that her whole willful, self directed life had never quite made room for until the very end.

Undset writes medieval farming, law, pilgrimage and faith with a scholar's exactness rather than any storybook gloss, and the effect is a heroine whose interior life, especially her guilt, reads as fully modern even while everything around her stays rigorously, unglamorously medieval.