Will I love A Woman in the Polar Night?

This chronicle of arctic life and landscape enchanted me from the beginning.

Here is the true story of Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter with no outdoor experience who travels to the remote northern coast of Svalbard to spend the winter of 1933-34 with her scientist husband.

Ritter’s frank voice and wry humor drew me right in; at first, she’s hilariously unimpressed by the pack ice and endless snow! But soon she’s deeply transformed by the same things that inspire me to write about the far north: the land’s vast scale, the aurora borealis, arctic foxes, and night skies brimming with… show more.

This book was right up my alley: a woman travels to Svalbard (Spitsbergen) to spend a year with her hunter husband and his friend. It is about survival in one of the most extreme places but within that harsh desolate lost-to-the world place, she finds what is holy about the true north. Written in the 1930s by a German woman. She goes there without our modern conveniences. She is brave and resourceful. Beautiful, spare writing.

What an amazing story, and to think it was true. Incredible when you consider when it happened.

Perhaps one of the most classic Arctic memoirs, this book is Ritter’s account of the year she spent in the remote Arctic wilderness of Spitsbergen in the 1930s. 

The nature writing is exquisite, and you can’t help but be transported to the time in place in which she lived, replete with polar bears and long, cold, (and dark) Arctic nights. 

What kind of person dreams of months of frozen winter darkness?

In 1934 Christiane Ritter set off for a remote hut in the Arctic with her husband and Karl, a hunter, to spend a year in the ice far from her luxurious city life in Austria.

She imagines a cosy retreat until she sees the hut and the horrifyingly basic conditions they’ll live in – just to get water for their first meal involves an hour and a half’s trek to a glacier, even the potatoes freeze, and she hadn’t expected to be left completely alone for weeks as the… show more.

I’m recommending it for several reasons. First, it’s a splendid read. Second, it presents a view of the Arctic from a woman’s rather than a man’s point of view – not a common thing, at least not in the 1930s, when the book was written. Third, I felt so strongly about the book’s merits that I got it back into print and wrote an introduction to it, too.