Christiane Ritter · 1938 · survival

Christiane Ritter's 1938 memoir. An Austrian painter joins her husband, a hunter and scientist, at a tiny hut on the north coast of Spitsbergen, expecting to read and sketch through a quiet winter. She spends a year there in the dark and the storms, often alone for days at a time, and comes back understanding the Arctic as something other than a hardship to be endured.

1. 1
   Vienna

   Christiane Ritter leaves a comfortable Austrian life at her husband's invitation to spend a year with him in the Arctic, packing paints and books and having very little idea what she is agreeing to.

2. 2
   Tromso

   At Tromso in northern Norway, the last port before the ice, she boards the ship north with the year's supplies - flour, coffee, coal and ammunition - among men who find the whole idea of her going faintly comic.

3. 3
   Grahuken

   The hut at Grahuken on the north coast of Spitsbergen is nine feet by nine, and the winter is four months without sun, storms that bury the door, and long stretches alone when the men are away hunting.