Undset's Jenny

Jenny / Sigrid Undset; translated from the Norwegian by W. Emmé
New York: Knopf, 1921, c1911.
305 p.
(read via Open Library)

Jenny Winge is a tall, confident, artist living in Rome with her friend Cesca when we first meet her. She's a quiet, self-contained Norwegian girl, as opposed to her flighty, dramatic, and quite beautiful best friend.

When Helge Gram arrives in Rome, he gets turned around in the dark and asks two Northern looking girls for directions to the railway station. From then on he is part of Jenny & Cesca's group of free-wheeling artists; like everyone else, he first falls for the vibrant Cesca, but eventually realizes it's Jenny he loves. 

Jenny is ready for love; as a reserved woman in her late 20s who has always been responsible for her family she's never had the opportunity for romance. She and Helge become engaged, and then leave the sunny peaks of Italy to return home to meet his family and get settled into a routine before marrying.

But that's where everything goes wrong -- the staid, restricted life that Jenny has to fit herself back into is stifling. And Helge doesn't look as appealing under the grey skies of home, especially when he's within in the circle of his unhappy family and jealous mother. Jenny begins to look elsewhere...but not too far, unfortunately for them all. 

This was a long, slow, story. It is told in segments, at least that is how it felt to me. Italy; Norway; then Italy again. And the slowly shifting relationships between the characters, both friendships and romantic liaisons, are the heart of it. 

I loved the characterizations of all the players - the two male friends that Jenny & Cesca are in company with in Italy are, surprisingly, not awful. They care about each other, they are concerned for one another, and they look after one another as well. It's refreshing to see friendships like this in early novels. And Jenny and Cesca also take time together to talk about more than just men, though Cesca does have her share of angst about them. There is conversation about art, and life, and meaning, alongside the more dramatic elements of the story.

It does get a little gender focused in the end as Jenny finds herself single and pregnant, and has to decide how that will shape her life. But her choices aren't obvious ones, and the outcomes were not what I'd expected.

While this is, overall, sadder than I'd hoped it would be, and grimmer about the potential of women to live freely as artists or just as people fulfilling their dreams, it is also a good read. It delves into things that we don't always think of people discussing candidly in 1911. This is one of the reasons I do like reading books from our recent past - we can't deny that people were aware of gender politics or the realities of sexual desire, or the constraints that women faced socially, when they are the basis of this novel. 

I don't want to expand on the plot - it's pretty tangled. But the  external events of the story are really only there to highlight the internal ones. It's Jenny's (and to a lesser extent Cesca's) story; their emotional development and decisions are the entire point. I won't forget these characters soon. Recommended.