Undset's oeuvre also includes children's books, hagiographic writings, and translations.
Responding to the rapid changes of the first decades of the twentieth century, Undset was a bold skeptic of modernity who regarded industrialization, materialism, and individualism as threats to social stability. Many of her early essays were directed against the rhetoric of the feminist movement, which, she believed, overlooked the value of the role of women within the traditional circles of family and kin: Undset argued that the rights to vote, to work, and to decide whether to have children must be considered within the context of the individual's greater responsibility to society as a whole. Her concern for the direction of modern society gradually came to include a contemplation of the role of religion, and in 1924 she converted to Roman Catholicism. From this time onward her writing included essays on the Catholic faith, the lives of saints, and pre-Reformation Norwegian history and literature. The issues of women and religion were afforded special attention in essay collections such as Et kvindesynspunkt (A Woman's Point of View, 1919) and Katholsk propaganda (Catholic Propaganda, 1927). Undset's interest was not merely in writing against the current of modern thought; her convictions were rooted in a belief that knowledge of the past should inform the present and the future.
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