Book description
This beautiful and moving story of young love is a classic of
European literature. Johannes, the miller's son, and Victoria,
daughter of the lord of the manor, enjoy a brief moment of ecstasy
that is as transitory as their dreams. They are forever separated by
their class, and circumstances force them into perverse cruelty to
each other. Yet, Victoria cannot live without her Johannes.
Victoria is the only novel Hamsun wrote that could be described as a
whole-hearted love story and was written at the beginning of his own
marriage (indeed Hamsun named his own daughter, Victoria, after the novel).
Knut Hamsun was the most influential writer of the late nineteenth
century, creating a new literary style and a new literary type, the
alienated outsider (typified in 'Mysteries'), which became defining
elements of modernism. In 'Growth of the Soil' he created a novel of
Biblical power, while 'Dreamers' shows the gentler comic side of his
imagination. Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920
and died in 1952.
