Sigrid Undset · 1922 · exile

The trilogy Undset won the Nobel for - a woman's whole life in fourteenth-century Norway, from a farm in the Gudbrandsdal to a convent by the Trondheimsfjord where the plague arrives in 1349. Undset was the daughter of an archaeologist and got the medieval detail right in a way nobody had before.

1. 1
   Jorundgaard

   A farm at Sil in the Gudbrandsdal, where Kristin grows up loved by a father she will spend the trilogy disappointing - and is betrothed at fifteen to a decent neighbour she has no intention of marrying.

2. 2
   Hamar

   The cathedral town by Mjosa, where her father takes her south as a child - the first time she sees anything of the world beyond the valley, and the beginning of wanting something the valley does not have.

3. 3
   Oslo

   Nonneseter convent, where she is sent to be safely kept until the wedding - and meets Erlend Nikulausson instead, who is under the ban of the Church for living with another man's wife, and ruins herself deliberately.

4. 4
   Nidaros

   Trondheim, and the pilgrimage to St Olav's shrine to confess it - walking barefoot up the nave with a candle, in the scene the whole first book has been building toward.

5. 5
   Husaby

   Erlend's estate in Trondelag, and twenty years as its mistress: seven sons, an estate he cannot manage and she can, and a treason plot that costs him everything they had.

6. 6
   Jorundgaard

   Back to her father's farm in middle age, running it, and Erlend refusing to live there because he will not be kept - the marriage ending in an argument in a courtyard that neither of them means.

7. 7
   Rein

   A convent by the Trondheimsfjord where she goes as a lay sister, and where the plague reaches Norway in 1349 - and she dies nursing it, which is the ending Undset got the Nobel for two years after finishing.