Overview

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. 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.

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9781805330899

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Reviews

'Spectacular... Extraordinary... A deeply affecting book, a memoir so erudite and so wise it's a mystery why it's been out of print in English for half a century' - New European Review 'Conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights' - Sara Wheeler, author of 'Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica' 'Astonishing, haunting... as much an exploration of the human psyche as it is a journey into one of the bleakest, most challenging and magical environments on earth' - Isabella Tree, author of Wilding: The Return to Nature of a British Farm 'Should you be the sort of person who likes to match their reading to the weather, or current Sunday night telly, you couldn't do better than this... The details of life there, then are fascinating and she's a wonderful nature writer too. It's deeply cosy all round' - Alexandra Heminsley, author of Running Like a Girl 'Extraordinary... It's a radical, feminist text that speaks to the disconnection from the rest of nature we are experiencing at unprecedented levels today. It's hard to believe it was written over 80 years ago' - Lucy Jones

Author Information

Born in 1897, Christiane Ritter was an Austrian artist 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. 'A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,' she would say in her later years. 'Then you will come to realise what's important in life and what isn't.' Ritter died in Vienna in 2000 at the age of 103.

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