Marie Bregendahl holds a secure position as one of the leading Danish novelists in the generation that evolved around the Danish poet and novelist Johannes V. Jensen, the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, and the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset. Like these writers, Bregendahl used her birthplace in the countryside as the setting for her fiction, describing economic and cultural changes in the lives of farmers and peasants before and during industrialization. Bregendahl captured a peasant culture in transition from isolation to involvement in modern European politics. As did her British contemporary Thomas Hardy, she created an imaginary landscape, resembling her birthplace, peopled with a vast gallery of characters of all ages; with supreme skill she focused on individual men and women as they underwent the transformations of their era. Like other European writers of her generation, Bregendahl spent her childhood in the country and moved to the...