A Woman in the Polar Night

by Christiane Ritter, Jane Degras (Translator), Sara Wheeler (Foreword by)

Overview

“An epic story, elegantly told and full of mystery.” — Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle

A rediscovered classic memoir – the mesmerizingly beautiful account of one woman's year spent living in a remote hut in the Arctic

“A refreshing voice in the canon of Arctic literature. . . charms its reader with its simple candor. Readers will delight in Ritter’s frank impressions and candid remarks.  – The Wall Street Journal

This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to 'read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content', but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape the lack of equipment and supplies... But as time passes, after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months on end of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty, gaining a great sense of inner peace and a new appreciation for the sanctity of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782275657
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Series:	Pushkin Press Classics
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	387,139
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in 1897, Christiane Ritter was an Austrian activist and author. She wrote A Woman in the Polar Night on her return to Austria from Spitsbergen in 1934. It has since become a classic of travel writing, never going out of print in German and being translated into seven other languages. Christiane Ritter died in Vienna in 2000 at the age of 103.

Table of Contents

Introduction Lawrence Millman 1

1 The Beckoning Arctic 11

2 Outward Bound 15

3 First Days in the Wilderness 29

4 Mikkl 56

5 By Boat into the Interior 61

6 The Earth Sinks into Shadow 77

7 Alone in the Hut 86

8 Peace after the Storm 96

9 Night Falls 108

10 The Bewitching Polar Night 122

11 The Unending Darkness 135

12 The Pack Ice and the First Bear 149

13 A Dead Land 157

14 A Hunter Brings the Mail 173

15 A Trip to Reindeerland 183

16 The Fight for Vitamins 196

17 Spring on the Ice 203

18 Spoilt for Europe 213

Editorial Reviews

An epic story, elegantly told and full of mystery. Even though I could never hope to match her bravery and aplomb, Ritter made me long to decamp at once for the harshest and wildest corners of the earth.” — Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle

From the Publisher

"An unpretentious but arresting book about life south of nowhere."—Time

Time

"An unpretentious but arresting book about life south of nowhere."—Time

Time