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Why read “Victoria”? While it may not hold the same popularity as “Sult” or “Markens Grøde,” it is a love fiction enveloping the youthful love souring in the process of aging and barriers of social hierarchies.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to read Hamsun again.

Hamsun passed away antagonized, forgotten by his people. Libraries rid themselves of all his works, and households burned all Hamsun collections they possessed. In a fortnight, he went from a national hero to the enemy of the country. An admirer of German writers Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, Hamsun sympathized with the Nazis, and the public displayal of his sympathies turned Norway against him. However, the 1940 Nazi invasion of Norway instantly changed the public view of Hamsun. In 1920, the awarding of the Nobel Literary Prize for “Markens Grøde” brought his international popularity to a peak. His best known works are “Sult” - “Hunger” - published in 1890 and “Markens Grøde” - “Growth of the Soil” - published in 1917. Much of Hamsun’s writing centers on social hierarchies, the solitude of outcasts in wilderness, and primitivism. Through the implementation of interior monologues and stream of consciousness, Hamsun’s novels pioneered Modernist elements in Norway. Nevertheless, rather than concentrating the subject of his writing on illustrating the countryside, Hamsun employs such imagery as a backdrop for the critical interactions between his characters. Growing up in the Hamarøy countryside of Norway, Hamsun was greatly influenced by the rural landscape and the pastoral scenes.

The Norwegian Nobel Literary Prize winner was born in 1859 in Gudbrandsdalen - commonly known as “the valley of valleys” - a rural district surrounded by the highest mountains of Scandinavia. Published at the turn of the century, “Victoria” is heavily characterized by the frequent use of inner monologues, its realist reflection of social gaps, and the light touch of the visual descriptions of the Norwegian countryside that highlights the interactions between characters.

Nonetheless, it remains one of the most important novels in the study of Nordic modernism. The 1898 “Victoria” may not be the first book that comes to the mind of most readers hearing the name “Knut Hamsun.” In fact, it may not even be the second.