The title of my talk this evening is the drama of grace, Sigrid Unset, and the narrative of conversion.

In 1941, the American novelist Willa Cather wrote the following.

Sigrid Unset is all a great woman should be on a giant scale. She is a wonderful cook, a proficient scholar,

and has the literature of four languages at her finger ends. There is in the woman a kind of heroic,

calm and warmth that rises above all the cruel tragedies and loss of fortune that the last three

years have brought. So you can read World War II. She simply surmounts everything that has been

wrecked about her and stands large and calm. She who has lost everything seems still to possess everything, and the small pleasures

can still make her rather cold eyes glow with marvelous pleasure. She combines in herself the nature of an

artist, a peasant, and a scholar. She is cut out on a larger pattern than any woman I have ever known,

and it rests me just to sit and look at the strength that stood unshaken through so much.

These are touching words from her fellow author and friend, but I wanted to start with them

because they reveal that Sigurd Unset is not principally a literary genius,

but someone who has suffered. Her life is every bit as interesting as her novels.

Action follows being. She wrote such incredible stories because she herself had such a story to tell.

She was tossed about by innumerable tragedies, an absent husband, religious persecution,

the death of two children, flight from the Nazis, exile from her homeland and destruction of her own home.

But in Willa Cather's words, she emerges from the rubble

as a giant.

She is calm and joyful and ready to tell her story.

Her hyperdeveloped capacities for perception,

imagination, and description make her able

to transport us elsewhere, even to a place as obscure

...