Sigrid Undset

Undset put in ten years as a clerk in an engineering office in Kristiania before writing could support her, and the early novels are about contemporary working women who look a good deal like the ones she sat beside. Kristin Lavransdatter, three volumes between 1920 and 1922, follows a woman through fourteenth-century Norway from a broken betrothal to old age, and the medieval detail rests on her archaeologist father's work. She took the Nobel in 1928. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1924 cost her readers at home. Her eldest son was killed in 1940 resisting the German invasion; she escaped through Sweden and the Soviet Union to America, spent the war arguing Norway's case there, and returned in 1945.